The small shop in the Plankengasse, with the tiniest but smartest of show windows, was near enough the thoroughfares to be accessible and not as expensive as the Graben, the Kärntnerstrasse or the Kohlmarkt. Little by little Mizzi was wriggling her way into that world of the new dispensation, peopled by the acquisitive wives, daughters, and "friends" of profiteers,--that full, loud, clanking, overfed world, that world of people mad to possess at last what "the others" had so long possessed. Theirs was the world of plenty. The promised land indeed. She was happier than she had ever been before. Her activities had full scope. She had no heart to bleed over the miseries of the starving city and she felt herself getting a really firm foothold in that "Schieber" world of every tradesman's desire. That "First Society" in whose uprisings and outgoings she had once delighted, in the reflection of whose splendors she, with the rest of the worthy burghers of Vienna, had once proudly shone, was gone, its glory the bare shadow of a shade. For thin, ruined countesses, for economical princesses Mizzi had no use, only in as much as she could say to the wife of one of the new lords of creation: "That's the very dressing gown the poor Countess Tollenberg was so enchanted with, but not a kreutzer to bless herself with, only such taste! It made me sad not to let her have it, but now I'm consoled, for you, dear, gracious lady, it's just the thing." And the "dear, gracious lady" would fall for it with a golden crash. Yes, Mizzi was doing well and intended to do better. When she wasn't selling, she was buying, like others in Vienna, who had little or much cash in their pockets, trying to imprison the vanishing value of money into objects that would remain visible, buying anything in fact that wouldn't melt before their eyes. They called all this "Sachwerthe," real value. For the antics of money were extraordinary, no one realized that better than Mizzi. No matter how carefully you guarded it, the next day it was less, was gone. You couldn't store it up any more than you could daylight. * * * * * As Tante Ilde that Wednesday noon was about to cross the Revolutionsplatz, once the Mozartplatz, overlooked by the Jockey Club, the Archduke Friedrich's Palace, the Opera and Sacher's Hotel, (the last two alone continuing to fulfill their ancient uses) she caught sight of a tall, familiar form hesitating by a lamp post. It was her nephew Hermann, evidently about to cross the street. He stood so long by the post that she easily caught up with him. "Manny!" she cried and touched him on the arm, but he turned towards her a face so strange that she was suddenly very frightened. Great beads of perspiration stood on his brow, about his mouth; his eyes were sunken, his nostrils blue and pinched.