He understood look and smile, for he said, hemming and hawing in an endeavour to conquer fresh confusion:

"I live alone with my mother, but unfortunately I cannot take you to see her because she is sickly and since my father's death has withdrawn entirely from society. But I would be most careful as to the company to which I should introduce you."

"I took that for granted," Lilly replied with amiable condescension. "In spite of that--thank, you, really--in the peculiar position I am in it is better for me not to mingle with people."

She gave him a regal bow, held out her hand, and left.

He followed her respectfully, and the six young gentlemen stood up in a row and curved their backs like their employer.

With flushed face Lilly pa.s.sed the partially completed decorations in the yard, and walked along the imitation marble entrance to the street, thinking, in mingled triumph and disenchantment:

"No, that was _not_ a path of destiny."

But she had suddenly acquired a betrothed. That was something, at any rate.

CHAPTER IV

Mr. August Kellermann, though unsuccessful in selling his pictures, enjoyed a fair reputation as a painter. He was a knowing fellow of about thirty-five, seven times washed in the life of the metropolis, who got great amus.e.m.e.nt from his own astuteness. He had a sandy Rubens beard and small bleared eyes with an eternal yawn in them from the night before.

He lived in an abandoned photographer's studio of enormous dimensions, like a huge gla.s.s case. To keep out the glare and the heat he had hung oriental rugs under the skylight, propping them up on long poles, and their fringed ends hung down as in a Beduin's tent.

When Lilly stepped from the dim anteroom into the glare of the diffused light from above--it was so high it seemed a very part of the heaven--she found him in a puce-coloured sack coat and worn green unheeled slippers, over which hung his red-checked stockings. He was squatting on the floor next to an oriental coffee tray poking at a narghile that had gone out.

"Lordy!" he exclaimed without responding to her greeting and without rising. "It's worth receiving such a visit."

Lilly prepared to withdraw. Then he shot to his feet like an arrow, hoisted his trousers with a shrug of his shoulders, and wiped the dust from a bamboo chair with his sleeves.

"Sit down, child. I have given up painting for the present, and have gone in for pottery, and I should not be able to make use of fair Helen herself, but I won't let anything like you escape me, not I."

Lilly handed him her benefactor's letter, which she had received the day before, and enlightened him as to the mistake he had made.

"Now his manner will change," she thought.

Nothing of the sort took place.

"Botheration!" he said, scratching his head. "n.o.blest of women, why are you so beautiful? Quondam general's wife"--here she was "general's wife"

again--"I had imagined spectacles and pimples, and now something like this comes along."

"Then you probably know what my motive is in visiting you?" asked Lilly, who was too faint-hearted to express resentment at his tone.

He clapped his fleshy hand to his forehead.

"One moment, one moment. Mr. Dehnicke, my dry bread-giver--dry referring to bread as well as to giver--_did_ say something to me day before yesterday, but I suffer from congenital defect of my faculties of apprehension, and I hope you will be good enough to--"

When Lilly explained the nature of her desires, he broke out into unrestrained laughter.

"That you shall have, my aristocratic friend. You shall certainly enjoy the benefit of my instruction. Even if you hadn't been foam-born! Such a treat doesn't happen every day. I will charm so many sunsets out of the heavens and set them on gla.s.s in hues so roseate you will never be able to look a rose in the face again."

Lilly was by no means ignorant that in her capacity of aristocratic lady, the part she wished to play, she should have left the studio long before. But she was too eager to avail herself of his readiness to instruct; she could not throw away the opportunity so painfully won.

"What would Anna von Schwertfeger do in such a situation?" she asked herself. Then, tossing her head, she said: "But there are certain matters to be settled before we proceed further. In the first place, I should like to know what your charges are, so that I may decide if I can afford to pay for such valuable services--"

He looked somewhat disconcerted, and remarked that Mr. Dehnicke would probably look out for that.

"Mr. Dehnicke has nothing at all to do with my money matters," she replied. "If there should be any misunderstanding as to that--" she grasped her parasol--she had kept her gloves on.

"Tut, tut, don't be so hasty," said Mr. Kellermann. He reflected a few moments, and then mentioned a reasonable charge, five marks a morning.

"The ruby ring," thought Lilly, and nodded.

"I'm curious as to the second condition," he said.

"It is more important to me than the first. It is--I should like to be treated like a lady."

"Oh," he said, "I'm not fine enough for you? We'll fix that. I can be fine as silk, I tell _you_, I can. In fact I possess six degrees of fineness, and all you need do is choose the one you like best: superfine, extrafine, fine, semifine, impolite, and downright vulgar.

Now select."

This joke and a few more similar in quality pleased Lilly so well that for the present she gave up her demand to be respected as a _grande dame_, and was content if in a.s.sociating with her he did not pay her court and took her as a "good fellow."

However, her admonition had not failed of effect. The next day when she came he was wearing boots.

He proved to be an intelligent, discreet teacher, who did not essay wild flights with his pupil and manifested kindly, considerate interest in her childish plan.

He devised something of gelatine especially for her purpose, by which colours on a transparency gained in brilliancy. He was untiring in planning new effects.

"I will make six b.l.o.o.d.y sunsets for you," he said, "with which you will deal a blow to all your compet.i.tors in a body, especially that extremely conscienceless lady who perpetrates the most impertinent pranks. I mean, of course, Dame Nature."

While Lilly daubed on a window pane, he stood smoking Turkish tobacco or chewing ginger before one of the modelling stands that took up the centre of the room and "pottered" at his work.

The artistic creations that he "fetched out of the depths of his soul"

were usually human figures half or third life size: knights in armour bearing banners, maidens in old German costumes aimlessly stretching out their hands, allegoric women's figures doing the same, heralds blowing trumpets, and now and then secession shapes, long, slim, swirly limbs which trailed off like a nixy's body into a fish's tail into ash trays, finger bowls, or other such pleasing and useful objects.

And all the while that he was turning out factory models, dusty, half-completed paintings and sketches hung on the walls, or stood on the floor leaning against the walls. They showed a bold inventiveness, a riotous joy in colour. Each seemed to bear the mark of a reckless conception and a laughing ability to execute.

One was a picture of a half-ruined church in a tropical forest with a pack of monkeys chasing over the altar; another, a group of stupid camels in a depressing desert scene snuffling at the corpse of a dead lion. The best was a painting of a naked woman weighed down by heavy chains, which bound her blooming, l.u.s.trous body to a parched rock, while a flock of black, red-eyed vultures hovered about her head.

There was much else which testified to force and originality, but the woman in chains remained Lilly's favourite.

One day she ventured to ask her teacher why he permitted all these paintings to go to ruin instead of finishing them and placing them on exhibit.

"Because I have to produce pot-boilers, you innocent angel, you," he replied, and splashed a clod of clay against the leg of the allegoric lady he was working on. "Because the world requires lamps and vases, but not an eternal beauty with mother-wit inside her lovely body. Because there are 'manufacturers of imitation bronze ware,' who keep you from dropping by the roadside. And because I'm a fellow with sound teeth who must have a few morsels of life to crunch, and, after starving for twenty years, would like to join the great band of Dionysus worshippers.

Do you understand, you afternoon-tea-soul, you?"

"But the woman with the chains, why don't you finish her at least?"