Free The Darts of Cupid: Stories by Edith Templeton

quarter, had been built for them by the bank before their arrival.
    The Viennese like to say that we in Prague are always offended, and it is true. Always inclined to feel inferior and provincial when confronted with anyone from the capital city of what once was our empire, we tend to bristle and to say things like "Don’t forget that we had the first paved streets in central Europe while you Viennese were still slushing ankle-deep in the mud." Or, in a more jovial mood, "Count Bobby meets Count Rudy, on the Graben, in Prague. He says, ‘Where’ve you been all this time? Been ill, or what?’ Rudy says, ‘No, I’ve been to Vienna. Funeral. Buried my mother-in-law.’ Count Bobby, ‘Ah, Vienna, the city of our dreams!’"
    My mother soon became Mrs. Haussman’s best friend, to everyone else’s bewilderment. She explained this by stating that Mrs. Haussman, unlike the other Viennese, was not uppity and never gave herself airs. And while this was quite true enough, the Haussmans began living on an unexpectedly grand scale, and it soon became the general opinion that it was just this quality of Mrs. Haussman’s that was such a shortcoming. Because Mrs. Haussman was wrong. Not outrageously, deliberately wrong—like, say, Countess Sternborn, who had enjoyed, even in old age, behaving like a brat, never letting one forget that she had once been a chorus girl, and thus felt free, in the drawing room, to take out some of her artificial teeth and, passing them round, to ask the guests to admire how well they were made—but wrong in lesser and more deadly ways. My grandmother knew that Mrs. Haussman was wrong, even before she met her.
    It was Karasek, the chef, who brought the tidings. Karasek worked for Lippert’s, the largest and finest delicatessen on our most elegant avenue, the Graben, and he could always be prevailed upon to supply choice dishes for important at-homes and dinner parties. "She comes and says, ‘Mind, you let me have the boiled beef, too, when you’ve done with it,’ " he told my grandmother. "I say, ‘How so, madam? The beef will be thrown away.’ ‘Not for me, it won’t,’ she says. I say, ‘But, madam, for a double-strength consommé such as you want, the beef is boiled for twelve hours—the meanest cuts, shins and shanks—and it ends up like gray rags. None of my ladies ever—’ She says, ‘There’s always a first time. We cut it up and dress it with onion and oil and vinegar, and it makes a supper dish for the children and the governess.’ "
    Conversation is made up of talk, but not all talk is conversation. Finding out that Mrs. Haussman had no conversation took us in Prague less than ten minutes. Even this might have been shrugged off, considering her husband’s standing, but not after the first Haussman tea party my grandmother was invited to—which she soon declared would be her last. The two dining rooms in the Haussman villa— the "everyday" one and the "good" one—were on the second floor. As soon as the table was cleared that afternoon, Mrs. Haussman went out to the landing and yelled to a manservant—thus betraying that she was not accustomed to a large house, where one rings for the staff. The manservant, in any case, shortly appeared, bearing a long jute sack, which he opened, throwing the contents—remnants of silk, tweed, and cotton—onto the parquet floor. The scandalized ladies were invited to help sort these out, kneeling and squatting, and choose the most suitable for making up into a quilt. While the ladies, still speechless, went on exchanging glances, she explained that eiderdowns were expensive, while a quilt, by contrast, could be filled with rubbishy fluff and would do splendidly for the governess’s bedroom.
    This, too, was resented by the guests. Whereas it had been considered only amusingly scandalous when the Countess Sternborn had once lifted her skirt at the bridge table, undone her garter, and used the tongue-shaped rubber part for erasing an