re 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.