Frau Brohl was unequaled in her inventions of new kinds of work.  Such things as book-markers and slippers, paper-baskets, bed-quilts and tablecloths, card-baskets, and chair-cushions were all too simple—­the mere a b c of the art.  Wonders like embroidered pictures for the walls, various kinds of fringes for the legs of pianos, fireplace hangings, gold nets for window-curtains, mottoes for the canary’s cage, silk covers for books, were the order of the day.  When any one came in he was first struck with surprise, which quickly changed to bewilderment.  Wherever he looked his eye fell on some piece of work, with no repose or unadorned space.  Here a row of family portraits, in plush and gold frames, all looking stiff and uninteresting—­on inspecting them at close quarters, they were seen to be not painted but embroidered in colored silks.  There hung a melon, the outside of the fruit represented by yellow, green, and brown satin, the stalk by gold thread, the little cracks and roughnesses by gray silk applique, the whole thing fearful and absurd in its exuberance.  And wherever one went or stood, sat down or laid one’s hand, there wandered a huge wreath of flowers in Berlin wool, or the profile of a warrior in cross-stitch sneered at one, or a piece of hanging tapestry of pompous pattern and learned inscriptions flapped at one, and everything was rich and tedious and terrifying and shocking in taste; and when one’s tired eyes looked out of the triply be-curtained windows into the street, one fell convinced that little angels would come down out of the sky clad in what was left over of the rococo furniture draperies, bordered with gold.

This unsightly museum of useless things was the occupation of Frau Brohl and Frau Marker’s lives, and here Malvine grew up to be the pretty girl to whom we have been introduced at the Ellrichs’.  Her mother was a sort of elder sister to her, and the only authority in the house was the grandmother.  She ordered the servants, and her daughter paid her the same timid reverence as in the time of her short frocks.  Frau Marker seldom opened her lips except to eat, or to answer her mother in a parrot-like sort of echo.  Frau Brohl’s energetic spirit stirred even in these narrow boundaries.  She did not feel at home in Berlin; she met no one she knew in the streets, and in fact knew no one, and this feeling of being among strangers, as if at some out-of-the-way fair, made her so uneasy that she hardly ever went out.  Often since Marker’s death she had thought of returning to Stettin, but when she reflected how dreadful it would be to pack up and unpack again all the thousand pieces of work, her courage failed her.  All the same she lived with her heart and soul in Stettin.  A local paper from Stettin was her only reading.  She kept up a regular correspondence with all her old acquaintances, who gave her news of all the engagements, marriages, births, and deaths of the rich people she had known.  If Stettin people of good standing