"Perhaps," she replied with an upward glance which was almost coquettish. "Oh, splendid!" he cried. His face now brightened into a mischievous smile, in which gaiety and devilishness counterbalanced each other. "Are you one of those who can laugh in her sleeve at--at--how shall I say?--at the whole humbuggery of it all--and at yourself? At yourself, my child, that's the main thing. Then you and I are one--nothing divides us. Then--" "May God forgive me," she thought, and held her handkerchief to her mouth to suppress her tittering. "Laugh at him," Mrs. Jula had said. But he seemed to take it as an invitation, as a delicate, friendly hint to cut the preamble short; for he sprang toward her and clasped her body. She pushed him back--she wrestled with him. Tears of shame and indignation welled up in her eyes. "What sort of a thing have I become?" a voice within her cried, while she struck at him with her fists. In the midst of the struggle she succeeded in reaching the bell. The maid appeared. He picked up his hat from the carpet, murmured something like "riffraff," and disappeared. Disappeared also from the little circle that he had sometimes honoured with his presence. * * * * * Henceforth Lilly ceased to aspire to the heights. CHAPTER XI The next year Lilly went through two little love affairs which were of no significance in her after life. During a four weeks' stay in the Riesengebirge, she met a novelist whose name was then on everybody's lips. He was airing his newly acquired fame in the Bohemian resorts and plucking what flowers he found by the roadside. He forced himself upon Lilly without much ceremony, and a few days later went his way in search of pastures new. And in Berlin she favoured a handsome, extremely elegant hussar of the Guards, who had flirted with her from his seat at the next table in an aristocratic restaurant. But he wounded her pride by attempting to repay her with a little leather box which came from the jeweler's. She sent back the box and turned him off. She disliked the thought of both adventures, and soon wiped them entirely from her memory. At Christmas a companion came to live with her. She had frequently complained to Richard that her life was empty; she craved something alive and loving to take care of. So he gave her a little naked monkey which could not warm itself even in her bosom. When angry, the monkey spat his scorn of her yearning in her face. Every now and then a marriage scheme was again propounded. Lilly knew the signs perfectly. When Richard paced through all the rooms, taciturn and distraught, wrinkling his forehead; when apropos of nothing he began to philosophise on the futility of all things earthly; when mama required the carriage at unwonted hours, and little packages of concert and opera tickets filled his purse, she knew something was impending. And then it seldom lasted long before Richard broke silence.