“Did Fräulein Vasek give that particular explanation of Herr Kreisler’s behaviour?”
“No. We put two and two together. She did say something—yes, she did as a matter of fact say that she thought she had been the cause of Kreisler’s behaviour.”
“How funny! I can’t stand that girl; she’s so unnatural, she’s such a poseuse. Don’t you think, Elsa?—What a funny thing to say? You can depend on it that that, anyhow, is not the explanation.”
“Sorbert has a rival perhaps?”
This remark was met in staring silence. It was a mixing of elements, an unnecessary bringing in of something as unapropos, as unmanageable; that deserved only no words at all. She did not wish to concede the light tone required.
Elsa had admitted that Fräulein Vasek was responsible for the statement, “I was the cause of Kreisler’s behaviour,” etc. That was one of those things (there being no evidence to confirm or even suggest it) which at once puts a woman on a peculiar pinnacle of bad taste, incomprehensibleness, and horridness. Bertha’s personal estimation of Kreisler received a complex fillip. This ridiculous version—coming after her version—was a rival version, believed in by her friends.
Bertha took some minutes to digest Elsa’s news. She flushed. The more she thought of this rival version of Fräulein Vasek’s, the more reprehensible it appeared. It was a startlingly novel and uncompromising version, giving proof of a perfect immodesty. It charged hers full tilt.
This version of hers had been the great asset of existence for three days. Some one had coolly set up shop next door, to sell an article in which she, and she alone, had specialized. Here was an unexpected, gratuitous, new inventor of versions coming along. And what a version to begin with!
Bertha’s version had been a vital matter, Fräulein Vasek’s evidently was a matter of vanity. The contempt of the workman, sweating for a living, for the amateur, possessed her.
But there was a graver aspect to the version of this poaching Venus. In discrediting Bertha’s suggested account of how things happened, it attacked indirectly her action, proceeding, ostensibly, from these notions.