The girls behind the counters and in the offices, in the sewing-rooms and factories, understood little of politics, but much of practical life. And they began to miss the Jewish young men very much. At first they had been carried away by the general enthusiasm; but when the morning after dawned they found their lives emptier and more poverty-stricken than before. They began to long for their exiled sweethearts, the good qualities of the Jews as lovers were exaggerated in the memory; these good qualities were constantly thrown in the teeth of their Christian successors, and the two were compared continually, much to the disadvantage of those in power. One day the _Arbeiter-Zeitung_ described a characteristic scene, which a reporter had observed in the inn of an excursion resort. A beautiful young creature had, for some reason or other, quarreled with her companion, who exclaimed in the course of the argument: “Wish you’d gone away with your Jew!” Whereupon the girl wiped the tears from her eyes and answered loudly: “Wish I had! I ain’t the only girl what had a Jewish friend, and we’re all sorry we ain’t got them any more! What do we get from you? You drink and gamble away your money, and we’ve got to buy our rags with what we make ourselves. And none of you is so nice to us as my Fritz was, or Trudl’s Rudi, or his friend Karl, what went with Liesl. They never let us pick up or carry anything, they always bought us the prettiest and best things, and when we went out with them they didn’t take us to such cheap lunchrooms, but to Hopfner, or the Opernrestaurant, and later to a swell café where there was music and people in fine clothes. And where love’s concerned--well, you can’t talk about such things, but them Jews knew how to treat a girl, and when they loved they never was so selfish like you fellows, what ain’t got no idea of what a woman needs!” These resolute words called forth a storm of indignation among the young men; the girls, however, silently exchanged glances, and nodded. CHAPTER IX. THE END OF THE _HAKENKREUZLER_ At a political meeting held shortly after the expulsion of the Jews Dr. Schwertfeger said that now, when the foes of the Aryan spirit no longer resided in Austria, there would be an automatic approximation of the various party groups, and a modification of political antagonism. He seemed to have been right. Almost annihilated by the results of the last election, dumfounded and staggered by recent events, robbed by the expulsion of their greatest minds, best journalists, and most spirited leaders, the Socialists remained silent and decided not to come out of their forced retirement for the time being. And the variance between the principles of the German Nationalists and the Christian-Socialists actually began to disappear.