Finally neurasthenia, on the track of so many, claimed him for its own. He developed a bad case of agoraphobia--could scarcely ever go through open spaces without a discomfort that amounted at times to agony, and Vienna seemed full of wide, open places. He would creep along walls, close to houses and doors, but when it came to crossing the street, unless, indeed, it were full of vehicles his eyes would sink and darken, his nostrils get blue and pinched. It was but one of various things,--that intolerably stupid going back and touching objects a second even a third time on his bad days, that continual putting on and taking off his coat when he was dressing, sometimes he was hours getting into his clothes, and other equally asinine matters. He still went to his office, across the hall,--but a one-armed, neurasthenic doctor! Half the patients who came needed something done that could only be done with two hands. His clientèle dwindled till mostly the poor alone came. To them he was an angel of mercy. But they made another complication. Mizzie hated the poor in any form, even the new poor, who had once been rich and whom she had envied in the old days, and when the quite thin pity engendered by his futile return had evaporated, she was constantly reproaching him for having a clientèle to whom he couldn't or wouldn't send bills. Hermann's life became a new kind of hell from which there seemed to be no more escape than from the final place of punishment. But for all Mizzi's unpleasant conjugal traits she was, as we have indicated, a woman of ability. She stepped out, on his return, when her practical sense showed her that the family fortunes in Hermann's hand would inevitably go from bad to worse, to retrieve them; and she did. She boldly opened a lingerie shop, and with her good taste, her industry, her heartlessness and her voice soft as honey to customers, she soon began to do quite well. Fanny had advanced the necessary loan and sent her the first customers who brought others in their train. She developed an unsuspected talent for selling. Naturally impatient she was accommodating to the last degree in her shop. She took back things that had been paid for and returned the money with a smile. She exchanged things, she adjusted things. She could always be counted on to have extra sizes for the dark, stout, often bearded ladies who patronized her in increasing numbers. They generally had the most elemental of underwear, thick, machine-made garments, with machine-made lace and terrible pink bows; some had none at all. Mizzi initiated them into the pleasant mysteries of transparent "dessous," real lace-trimmed and beribboned in delicate shades. And they had money. "Jesus, Marie, Joseph!" Mizzi would often exclaim, "what money! Great wads of it!"