Laura was a charming hostess at these highly original men’s parties. She enjoyed queening it over these men with a future or a past. She flirted gaily and without sentimentality with both Mars and Mercury, with a secret leaning towards Mercury. Yes, in the company of these moneyed men Laura was perfectly at home. She enjoyed the cool rapid talk of investments and bargains in shares. Their lightning estimates and calculations gently stimulated her. She was buoyed up and sustained by these speculative chances. She constantly swayed between pleasant irresponsibility and instructive calculations. Her cool and sparkling head exercised, in the last resort, a natural and easy domination over her senses. She played with bold assurance, with her womanliness as the stake.
Yes, Laura liked gambling, but she liked winners still better, winners who understood how delicately to share their gains. Since she had observed that her fair type made a special impression on Jews she had deliberately begun to cultivate “the little black boys” as she called them. This was the period of the first national industrial boom and “the little black boys” were making larger fortunes than ever. Because whatever happens in the world it is sure to make the Jews wealthier. And Laura kept to the fore and was given many a helping hand and many a hint which she did not neglect to use to her advantage. People thought that she liked to risk small sums for the fun of the thing, but secretly she carried an a systematic and extensive business by which she had collected a not insignificant fortune.
The last comer in Laura’s circle was Jacob Levy, the lawyer.
Levy was a business lawyer, still quite young, but obviously a man with a future. He had a large, but finely chiselled nose, dark brown eyes and thin, ironically curled lips. His was an international face, a face which seemed as if for generations it had stared itself tired in all the markets of the world. Though born in Sweden, Levy spoke with a certain accent. His father was a Danish Jew and his mother came from Poland. The ancient Swedish title of his professional rank seemed incongruous in him. He was a cosmopolitan, and money and the hazards of money were his real home and country. Behind his mask of pale indifference lay a passionate will and a cool, sharp observation which sometimes got the better of him. In the most impersonal tones he would utter extraordinarily insolent truths, which sometimes cut straight across his own interests.
Laura liked those truths, which had not yet however, been directed against herself.
Stellan did not share his sister’s taste. He detested Levy and treated him with an icy cold rudeness, which only seemed to amuse him. They emphasized their respective vocations as officer and lawyer and indulged, of course in most general terms, in exquisite sarcasms at each other’s expense. To keep to the general is often the best way to offer personal insults. In the beginning the atmosphere was a little chilly and depressed at Laura’s first dinner of the season. Financiers sat stiff in a corner and looked as if the State Bank had raised its rate, and the military kept to themselves and discussed promotions and the damned journalistic moles. The hostess herself hovered about with a little frown on her brow. Perhaps it was Stellan’s irritation that infected the others. He was not the only one waiting for Manne von Strelert, everybody was saying,
“Wasn’t Captain von Strelert coming tonight...? I hope Manne won’t fail us tonight...!”
Good old Manne seemed to be a special attraction! At last the cavalry arrived in all its glory. The talk at once became livelier and gayer. Everybody chatted and laughed round the tall young officer with the careless and mischievous eyes. Though not a wit there was nevertheless a certain distinction in all that Manne said. He was especially characterized by a kind of good-tempered acquiescence in his Fate. He was capable of anything impossible and was always game. He realized that somewhere within him there were numerous possibilities but it never occurred to him to try to develop them. In his aristocratic helplessness he had a certain likeness to those race horses which are so tall that they can never feed themselves. They simply cannot reach down to their fodder.
Manne von Strelert’s character was summed up in two prominent and widely appreciated fundamental qualities: he could not say “no” and he had a wonderful, glorious, never-failing bad luck in gambling. To this it should be added that for some time past the owner of Kolsnäs found himself in an embarrassing financial position. Is it then strange that all eyes lit up around him and that tonight he was the greatest attraction at Laura’s dinner?
Stellan occasionally reproached Manne in gentle and almost flattering tones for his extravagance. He had during the course of years won somewhat large sums of money from his old messmate and childhood friend. And tonight he simply could not help winning more.