CHAPTER XIII.
KAFFEEKLATSCH.
“Phillis. I want none o’ thy friendship!
Lesbia. Then take my enmity!”
“When a number of ladies meet together to discuss matters of importance, we call it ‘Kaffeeklatsch,’” Courvoisier had said to me on that never-forgotten afternoon of my adventure at Köln.
It was my first kaffeeklatsch which, in a measure, decided my destiny. Hitherto, that is, up to the end of June, I had not been at any entertainment of this kind. At last there came an invitation to Frau Steinmann and to Anna Sartorius, to assist at a “coffee” of unusual magnitude, and Frau Steinmann suggested that I should go with them and see what it was like. Nothing loath, I consented.
“Bring some work,” said Anna Sartorius to me, “or you will find it langweilig—slow, I mean.”
“Shall we not have some music?”
“Music, yes, the sweetest of all—that of our own tongues. You shall hear every one’s candid opinion of every one else—present company always excepted, and you will see what the state of Elberthal society really is—present company still excepted. By a very strange chance the ladies who meet at a klatsch are always good, pious, virtuous, and, above all, charitable. It is wonderful how well we manage to keep the black sheep out, and have nothing but lambs immaculate.”