To such an extent was she dominated by her fancy that what was her actual existence, moving on from day to day in monotonous prison-like loneliness, seemed to her a dream, an oppressive death stupour, painless, but also pleasureless. Her being did not expand in real life until the sticky pages of a novel began to rustle in her hand. Intimidated and unresisting as she was, she did not find the courage to justify what was holiest to her even in her own eyes. She felt it to be a sin on which her hungry soul fed as on manna. Mrs. Asmussen had bethought herself of a diabolic way of still further humiliating Lilly. Like many a believing Protestant, she regarded religion solely as a scourge. Hitherto she had not shown the least solicitude concerning Lilly's piety, but now she began each meal with a long prayer of repentance, and while the steam curled invitingly from the soup tureen, she would beseech God with sighs and tears to raise Lilly from the depths to which she had sunk. And woe to Lilly if caught backsliding! That first chastisement was not the last. Every pretext was seized for beating and cuffing her. Storms of abuse showered down on her unprotected head. She did not dare breathe until the medicine prescribed by the eminent physician began to have its soothing effect. Then she would pounce on the first book she came across, and amid the forging of signatures and broken marriage vows, amid death by poisoning and the mad acts of love, she would suffer and triumph, triumph and die, blissful in her sufferings, intoxicated to the very end. CHAPTER VII It was on a March afternoon, when the sun was shining with young impertinence and the heat was untimely. The black slabs of snow at the edge of the pavement had melted into gleaming puddles, and a sparkling shower fell from the icicles clinging to the roofs. Over to the south-west the red evening glow lay spread on the house fronts like gay rugs separated by an oblique line from the shadow of the walls on the near side. The window-panes glowed as if they were suns radiating their own light, and the sparrows chased one another along the dripping eaves. But best of all in this sorry spring of city streets was the rare spicy smell of thawing. Even the vapours rising from the gutters, now running again, gave an inkling of greening meadows and bursting boughs. Lilly, who had gone out on hardly more than three occasions the whole winter, sat behind the counter and looked through the window longingly. Everywhere she saw that windows and doors had been opened wide, everywhere breasts hungering for air greedily drew in the breath of coming spring. So she, too, opened the casement wide and gave the door to the hall a push, which sent it flying back and knocked down the broom, standing at its post, as always. Through the open doorway she could see into the parlour of the tenant who lived on the other side of the hall and who, likewise, had flung back his door for spring to enter.