Explore "Mothers of Men" by William Henry Warner on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
The "Two Eagles" was one of those little cafés which abound in Vienna; good beer, music, and freedom; the rendezvous of students, with a fair sprinkling of the military.
To Marie, peeping out from the tiny, none-too-clean room, they had given her to dress in, it seemed far worse than it really was, for the girl's eyes had only looked on life at the convent, and from the windows of her father's house. The clicking of the steins on the bare tables, the rough voices of the waiters as they hurried back and forth, the scraping of chairs on the sanded floor, the floating layers of blue smoke through which the lights blurred, the students with their wide black ties and unkempt hair, with here and there a splash of color where some officers sat sprawled about a table. This was a world of which she had never dreamed, and she shrank instinctively from its cheap tawdriness. Through it all, breaking out in shrill peals, or suppressed giggles, came the laughter of women. Laughter more than anything is indicative of caste, and this coarse mirth was strange to Marie's ears.