It was in this best room on Neanderstrasse, four flights up, over a china shop, a piano-renting establishment, and a "repair studio," from the windows of which room an oblique view was to be obtained of the greenish grey waves of the Engelbecken, and into which a broad expanse of genuine Berlin smoky sky actually shone, that Lilly one day landed.
Mrs. Laue was a woman of fifty, worn out by overwork, with a face like a dried apple, and great staring, tearful eyes. She circled about Lilly in incredulous admiration, as if unable to comprehend that so much brilliance and beauty had strayed into her home.
The very day of her arrival Lilly was informed of her history. Her husband had been cashier and bookkeeper at one of the favorite variety theatres in Berlin, and twenty years before had departed this world, leaving her without home or protection. There was no rosy glamour to glorify tears wept in solitude, no comic songs to drown the cry of hunger.
Here that mysterious round creation, which on closer inspection proved to be a lamp shade, came to her rescue. It had been presented to her by an artistic friend, and it occurred to her to use it as a model for making others to sell.
After peddling her wares about for years, after long drudgery and disenchantments of all sorts, she at last conquered a market for her "pressed-flower lamp shades," and won for herself a name as specialist in her field.
In her back room with one window, which smelled of hay and paste, and where hundreds of dried flowers lay on a long white deal table--she herself did not gather them, of course, for lack of time--she had worked for nearly two decades tapping, daubing, pasting, drying, threading, and weaving sixteen hours a day, and had earned--thanks to her renown as a specialist!--so much that she was compelled to rent her best room, her treasure chamber, her sanctuary, to a stranger for thirty marks a month.
Lilly and Mrs. Laue, it is true, did not remain strangers.
Into the existence of this back-room being, in whose eyes a few betinseled ballet-dancers were paragons of beauty, the embodiment of unattainable splendour, Lilly descended from the world of genuine aristocracy as from heavenly heights. Her hostess idolised her, because she saw in her a messenger from that wholly improbable land which exists only in novels, and in which words like "lackey" and "drawing-room," and "pearl necklace"--Lilly soon told Mrs. Laue of hers--and other such things as one allows to melt on one's tongue with half-closed eyes, are taken as a matter of course.