Her dream was to have a smart shop at Carlsbad. She had awakened to a brief political interest when she found that almost overnight the Czechs had become, unaccountably, the darlings of those against whom they had so recently fought, and later she discovered that Carlsbad was filled with victorious foreigners who turned their gold joyfully into Czechish crowns and she was forever comparing the rising Czech currency with the descending Austrian, and was visibly impatient at the senseless fact that the war had left her, a perfectly good Czecho-Slovak, high and dry in Vienna as the wife of a crippled Austrian. There wasn't any sense in anything, and Mizzi vented mercilessly her dissatisfaction on Hermann. She was always thinking to herself and often proclaiming openly that Hermann was "dumm, but dumm," as little of a "Nutznieser" as anyone ever had the bad luck to be married to. With even the slightest sense of values, he ought to have got something out of the war. Privately Mizzi adored profiteers. But Hermann wasn't made that way. In the end, he got tired of hearing what his father-in-law would have done in this, that or the other case. That canny Czech, Ottokar Maschka, had, unfortunately for Mizzi, died just as he was about to gather in the fruits of his labors, and when Mizzi married the promising young Viennese doctor the only visible goods she brought with her was the furniture with which they furnished their home; large, solid, comfortable pieces of mahogany and maple, and a lot of linen. But all that Mizzi had long since changed. Mizzi was a forward looker and liked to keep up with, when she couldn't run ahead of, the styles. She had a flair about novelties that was to stand her in good stead. Hermann had ineffectually protested when she got rid, bit by bit, of the furnishings of the parental house. The only good thing about it all was that it kept her busy. But when he found himself sleeping in a narrow grey bed with conventionalized lotus flowers in low relief, one at the head and one at the foot, he felt himself completely and forever a stranger in that house. Then, too, the new chairs were extraordinarily uncomfortable, the tables small, while the pale mauve upholstery gave him a continual sense of being in a warehouse glancing over things he had no intention of buying....