Hermann had ineffectually protested when she got rid, bit by bit, of the furnishings of the parental house. The only good thing about it all was that it kept her busy. But when he found himself sleeping in a narrow grey bed with conventionalized lotus flowers in low relief, one at the head and one at the foot, he felt himself completely and forever a stranger in that house. Then, too, the new chairs were extraordinarily uncomfortable, the tables small, while the pale mauve upholstery gave him a continual sense of being in a warehouse glancing over things he had no intention of buying....
The small shop in the Plankengasse, with the tiniest but smartest of show windows, was near enough the thoroughfares to be accessible and not as expensive as the Graben, the Kärntnerstrasse or the Kohlmarkt. Little by little Mizzi was wriggling her way into that world of the new dispensation, peopled by the acquisitive wives, daughters, and "friends" of profiteers,—that full, loud, clanking, overfed world, that world of people mad to possess at last what "the others" had so long possessed. Theirs was the world of plenty. The promised land indeed. She was happier than she had ever been before. Her activities had full scope. She had no heart to bleed over the miseries of the starving city and she felt herself getting a really firm foothold in that "Schieber" world of every tradesman's desire. That "First Society" in whose uprisings and outgoings she had once delighted, in the reflection of whose splendors she, with the rest of the worthy burghers of Vienna, had once proudly shone, was gone, its glory the bare shadow of a shade. For thin, ruined countesses, for economical princesses Mizzi had no use, only in as much as she could say to the wife of one of the new lords of creation:
"That's the very dressing gown the poor Countess Tollenberg was so enchanted with, but not a kreutzer to bless herself with, only such taste! It made me sad not to let her have it, but now I'm consoled, for you, dear, gracious lady, it's just the thing." And the "dear, gracious lady" would fall for it with a golden crash.
Yes, Mizzi was doing well and intended to do better. When she wasn't selling, she was buying, like others in Vienna, who had little or much cash in their pockets, trying to imprison the vanishing value of money into objects that would remain visible, buying anything in fact that wouldn't melt before their eyes. They called all this "Sachwerthe," real value. For the antics of money were extraordinary, no one realized that better than Mizzi. No matter how carefully you guarded it, the next day it was less, was gone. You couldn't store it up any more than you could daylight.
As Tante Ilde that Wednesday noon was about to cross the Revolutionsplatz, once the Mozartplatz, overlooked by the Jockey Club, the Archduke Friedrich's Palace, the Opera and Sacher's Hotel, (the last two alone continuing to fulfill their ancient uses) she caught sight of a tall, familiar form hesitating by a lamp post. It was her nephew Hermann, evidently about to cross the street. He stood so long by the post that she easily caught up with him.
"Manny!" she cried and touched him on the arm, but he turned towards her a face so strange that she was suddenly very frightened. Great beads of perspiration stood on his brow, about his mouth; his eyes were sunken, his nostrils blue and pinched.
"Auntie dear, you've come at the right moment. I can't," he hesitated, a look of agony and shame on his face, "get across alone. Give me your arm. I was waiting till some wagons came along. It's easier then. Don't say anything about it to Mizzi. She doesn't understand," he ended entreatingly. Bending, he passed his hand through her arm and with a tightening of his body, slowly crossed the street, then kept close by the houses, as far away from the curb as possible.
"You see," he said with difficulty, "I'm quite done for," tears stood in his dark, kind eyes. "And I'm not going to die either," he added, "I've seen so many others go just where I'm going."
"Manny, Manny, you'll get better. You must get better. Think of all the good you do!" his aunt cried at last out of her grief for him. She hadn't been able to say a word at first, only pressed more closely against his side.