Lilly lacked the courage to show her creations to her master. He had declared, as a matter of principle he would have nothing to do with those pasted abominations. But it would have been a great pleasure to let Mr. Dehnicke see what she had learned and achieved since she had visited him.
Unfortunately, after receiving that one letter, she did not hear from him again, and she was abashed at having been set aside so lightly.
"What the devil--the bronze manufacturing business seems to be booming all of a sudden. Our Mr. Dehnicke can't give me enough orders. He's up here every day to see how things are progressing."
Something in Mr. Kellermann's manner of blinking at her made Lilly blush, and disquieted her, though at the same time it filled her with a degree of satisfaction.
At length, when the seven pairs of plates had been painted, and she could no longer endure her excess of eager pride, she took heart, and wrote him a letter on her beautiful ivory paper with the golden, seven-pointed coronet--she had about twenty sheets of it left. Since he had taken such kindly interest in her, she wrote, she would ask him to come next Sunday afternoon, and so on.
Her kind letter gratified his dearest wish; he had greatly desired to visit her but had remained away so long merely out of respect for her wishes.
And then, on the appointed Sunday afternoon, he came.
Lilly had placed a gladiolus plant in the punch bowl and stuck pink carnations back of the box containing the lamp shade. Suspended at the windows by silk ribbons hung the sunsets glowing like a conflagration and throwing a magic light on the motley frippery that Mrs. Laue had saved along with her own self from better times. In her white lace blouse, which she herself had washed and ironed, Lilly looked gay and festive, and when she held out her hand to Mr. Dehnicke who appeared in the doorway clad in patent leather shoes and a chimney-pot, bowing and scraping, she was once again the affable, unapproachable society lady, who three weeks before had entered his office, and given rather than gotten.
Her benefactor seemed all the more embarrassed.
He sniffed the poor-people's smell that penetrated Mrs. Laue's best room from the rest of the house, looked up and down the walls uneasily, and in general acted as if he were trespassing on forbidden territory.