Free The Little Book by Selden Edwards

found the Christian Socialist party.”
    “He sounds like quite a force,” Wheeler said.
    “A force, yes,” Kleist continued. “The only drawback is that he’s using extreme anti-Semitism as a political force. A powerful and disruptive one.”
    Wheeler cringed. “I have heard that. It’s not good.”
    “But it has been extremely effective. And it is a temporary phase, you know. It won’t go anywhere. Viennese are extremely good-natured, and we know that things will settle down soon. There are just too many Jews in high places.”
    “I don’t know,” Wheeler said glumly. “It doesn’t sound good to me. Maybe the mayor knows what he’s doing, but someone is going to come along and take all this in a very bad direction.” He repressed a shudder.
    Even Wheeler did not understand the immediacy of his prediction. He had no way of knowing that the stern young American he had seen with Mayor Lueger had come to Vienna on a mission of which yesterday’s meeting in this very café was the first step.
    Wheeler left the Café Central in the early afternoon and had strolled back through one of the parks along the Ringstrasse. His focus drifted to a group of young people—wealthy young literati, he figured from their dress, in their early twenties, the kind who frequented coffeehouses and lived the now-legendary lives of sensitive artists. There were three men and four women in animated conversation, meeting in the park before launching some excursion.
    One of them, a young woman, caught his attention immediately. She was standing with the group but closest to an artistic young man who seemed at first glance to be doting on her. She stood out from her effete peers as the epitome of the fabled Viennese beauty who had come to life in his Haze-inspired prep school dreams. She was not large framed and Germanically earthy, but full bosomed and small waisted and a touch more delicate than Wheeler’s impression of Arnauld Esterhazy’s ideal “sweet girl,” a true Viennese beauty nonetheless, one worthy of the best gilded canvas of Gustav Klimt. Her skin was pale, and she wore just a trace of natural rouge on her cheeks and lips. There was something about her that struck Wheeler immediately, fatefully, something about the way her eyes sparkled as she spoke the gentle Viennese German that riveted his attention with the compulsion to eavesdrop on every euphonic syllable she spoke. An indescribable attraction radiated from her, something overpowering, the innocent and unattainable sexuality that the Haze’s stories had given life in the adolescent fantasies of his oversexed prep school following.
    Well-born Viennese women, said the Haze, were compelled to stay aloof and chaste until marriage, repressing whatever fires of passion flared up inside, either acknowledged or subliminal. No matter how libertine or free-thinking their artistic friends, there was a dimension they could neither express nor act upon until after the sanctification of marriage. This fabled repression, needless to say, gave the great Dr. Sigmund Freud and his colleagues most of their practice and the field for their remarkable insights. But it gave the young unmarried women of the Viennese bourgeoisie an irresistible appeal, the Haze told the boys, a subtle and unattainable sensuality.
    Well-born Viennese men, on the other hand, compelled in an opposite direction, were encouraged to seek sexual exercise outside their class, despite the threat of dreaded venereal disease from the city’s myriad prostitutes, or, more safely, as Arthur Schnitzler had made so public in his fiction, in the warm and easy embrace of a working-class “sweet girl,” with whom he tallied up his plentiful sexual encounters, but whom he never considered marrying.
    Wheeler had trouble keeping his eyes off her, and once she looked his way, she caught him in one of his enraptured stares. In the instant their eyes met, she did not look furtively away as one might expect from an innocent