When Frederick von Kammacher entered the room, she blushed slightly, and held her hand out to him indolently.  Unfortunately, this hand had short, ordinary fingers, probably the plebeian heritage from her mother, her father having had long, beautiful hands.  Frederick was at least a head taller than anybody in the room and was distinguished from the other gentlemen by his air of good breeding.  He kissed Mrs. Lilienfeld’s hand, German fashion, and begged her pardon for having come so late.

The subject of discussion, of course, was the hearing in the City Hall.  Lilienfeld ran about, offering the reporters cigars and cordials, so importunate in his hospitality as not to shrink from sticking long Havanas into their coat pockets and cigarettes into their cases.  There was design in this.  Every now and then he would take a reporter aside to force upon him information regarding Ingigerd’s past, her birth, her rescue, her father, her European success, and the way in which her talent had been discovered.  It was a rather garish mixture of truth and fiction.  Lilienfeld knew that this story of her life would appear in the New York newspapers that very same evening in connection with the report of the audience in the City Hall.  He had brewed the concoction according to his own recipe from various details that he had heard, and he felt certain of its effectiveness.

Ingigerd looked very tired.  But she had received orders to be as lavish as possible with her amiabilities so long as a single reporter remained in the house.  Frederick felt sorry for her.  He saw that her severe professional duties had begun.

Mrs. Lilienfeld was a calm, refined woman of nearly forty, with a look of suffering on her face, yet extremely attractive.  She was dressed with tasteful simplicity.  One got the impression that her husband worshipped her blindly and was accustomed to act, or to refrain from acting, according to a scarcely perceptible glance from her soft, grave eyes.  For all his noisiness the bull-necked man, coarse, brutal, sensual, was like a timid child before her.

She devoted herself for a while to Frederick, who felt he had found grace in the lady’s eyes and that for some reason she wished to be helpful to him in leading him away from the aberrations of his passion.  Had he not had a sense of security in the firmness of his decision, he might perhaps have given more serious attention to her searching questions, which showed that she had done some thinking about him.

Her method was far from flattering to Ingigerd.  With an infinitely disdainful smile, she called the girl, who was chattering nonsense to a circle of flirtatious reporters and was overwhelmed with their tokens of approval, “a mechanical doll with a light head of porcelain filled with sawdust.”

“A good plaything,” she said, “a plaything for a man, an article of merchandise, but nothing more.  She may be worth money, but she is not worth anything else.  She is not worth more than any piece of emptiness, any trifle, or knickknack.”