In a moment, Mizzi, in velvety accents was greeting Frau Fuchs as if she were a queen. She touched appreciatively the sable scarf, lauded its beauty, saying, "You certainly get the best of everything." Then she turned and presented her aunt, Frau Kommerzienrath Stacher, born von Berg. Mizzi laid it on thick, resting some of her 75 kilos on the Kommerzienrath, adding the full weight of the others to the "von." Then she proceeded to show Frau Fuchs a certain red velvet jacket with a little gold border, and Frau Fuchs had gone into raptures over it, and had said she must have it, and then her eye had lighted on a leather hand bag ornamented with Irma's medallion of "petit point." Though Frau Stacher recognized it, she was somehow not surprised to hear Mizzi, as she drew attention to its workmanship, say that it had been made by a certain Archduchess, positively starving, and Frau Fuchs sniffing up the subtle perfume of royalty that Mizzi's words caused to rise from the bag, had taken it eagerly. "No, is it true?" she had cried in ecstasy, and had drawn her glove from her thick, beringed hand and opened her humpy alligator skin bag with its loud green and gilt clasp and counted out a sheaf of banknotes. Mizzi herself had wrapped the bag and the dressing sack up in her finest paper and sent one of the girls (the one who did the least good work) out to put the parcels into Frau Fuchs' Mercedes.
"Isn't she awful?" said Mizzi when they were alone, "but without her and a lot more like her, we'd starve. Her husband is stone-rich, has an Exchange Bureau in the Kärntnerring. How she used to hate to pay out the money! But I changed that, she's a bit afraid of me."
There was indeed something awe-inspiring at moments about Mizzi, something that she could invoke to decide wavering purchasers. Then still under the charm of Tante Ilde's gentle but quiet appreciation, also under that of good business dispatched, Mizzi gave her a little handkerchief. It had a yellow stain on it that they hadn't been able to get out, still it was a handkerchief and a gift, and Tante Ilde gratefully receiving the attention for much more than it was worth, thought perhaps she had misjudged Mizzi.
It hadn't been at all bad going to her for dinner, except for that terrible depression when she thought of Hermann. No, it hadn't been at all bad that first time, and she repulsed certain lurking suspicions that every week might prove too much for Mizzi's longanimity.
Then, too, she had good news to take back to Irma; the bag had been sold, Mizzi had counted out the money that she had promised Irma for the medallion, and though it didn't in the slightest correspond to the price Mizzi had received for the bag, Tante Ilde could be trusted to keep that hidden in her breast. Indeed Mizzi said it had cost her a monstrous amount of money to get the bag mounted, that she didn't know how she could afford to take anything else from Irma, she hadn't made a kreutzer on that bag, she only did it to help Irma, etc., etc. No, Tante Ilde didn't repeat from one to the other. Those little households that day by day were spilling their secrets before her whom they received in charity,—out of their goodness, out of their pity,—were sacred to her.
That night, as she lay awake hearing Ferry's hacking little cough, she was thinking almost entirely of the plight of Manny. Nothing had ever been too much for Manny, when it came to doing something for some one else and now.... If the time did come for Manny to be put somewhere, Mizzi would have money to pay for him, and what she didn't do, why Fanny, there was always Fanny. Down which ever miserable road of their misfortunes they looked, Fanny glitteringly stood, Fanny dispensing benefits generously, easily, not always wisely, after her own special way. Tante Ilde suddenly felt she didn't understand the first thing about life, and she had filled the three-score and ten of the allotted span. When did one begin to understand?
V
THE EBERHARDTS
Rallentando
"Süsses Leben! Schöne, freundliche Gewohnheit des