She received the Countess Lenzdorff with effusive cordiality, referred to several youthful reminiscences which they possessed in common, and was quite gracious to both the younger ladies. After several commonplace remarks, she dashed boldly into a discourse upon the final destiny of the earth and the adjacent stars.
She had just informed her guests that she was privately engaged upon the improvement of the electric light, and should soon have completed a system of universal religion, when a sudden influx of guests caused her to stop in the middle of a sentence, leaving her hearers in doubt as to whether the catechism of the new faith was to be printed in Volapük or in French, in which latter language most of the Baroness's intellectual efforts were given to the world.
Erika was obliged to leave her place beside the hostess and to mingle in the crowd that now rapidly filled the three reception-rooms.
She found very few acquaintances, and made the rather annoying discovery that, with the exception of a couple of flat-chested English girls, she was the only young girl present. If Count Treurenberg had not made his appearance to play cicerone, she must have utterly failed to understand what was going on around her.
The masculine element was the more strongly represented, but the feminine contingent was undoubtedly the more aristocratic. It consisted chiefly of very beautiful and distinguished women of rank who almost without exception had by some fatality rendered their reception at court impossible. Most of them were divorced, although upon what grounds was not clear.
The strictly orthodox Venetian and Austrian families avoided these entertainments, not so much upon moral grounds as because it was embarrassing to meet déclassées of their own rank, and because, besides, they believed this salon to be a hotbed of the rankest radicalism, both in morals and in politics.
In this they were not altogether wrong. There was nothing here of the Kapilavastu system of which the old Countess was wont to complain in Berlin; no, every imaginable topic was discussed, and after the most heterogeneous fashion. Consequently the salon was in its way an amusing one, its tiresome side being the determination on the part of the hostess not to allow her guests to amuse themselves, but always to offer them a plat de résistance in some shape or other.
On this evening this plat was Fräulein Minona von Rattenfels; and in the midst of Count Treurenberg's most amusing witticisms the guests were all bidden to assemble for the reading in the largest of the three rooms.
Here she sat, with her manuscript already open, and the conventional glass of water on a spindle-legged table beside her.
She was about fifty years old, large-boned, stout, and very florid, dressed in a red gown shot with black, which gave her the appearance of a half-boiled lobster, and with strings of false coin around her neck and in her hair.