Our own Set by Ossip Schubin — Read

And now to conclude.

Baroness Sterzl was one of those happily rare natures who have not one redeeming point. In her Moravian estate, whither they now retired, she was sick of her life, and treated Zinka with affectionate austerity. Bored and embittered, she was always bewailing herself and made every one miserable by her sour mien and doleful, appearance. When the year of mourning was ended she began to crave for some excitement; she made excursions to watering places, and to Vienna, where she gathered round her the fragmentary remains of her old circle of acquaintance and tried to astonish them by magnificent reminiscences of her sojourn in Rome. At the same time she still wore deep furbelows of crape, and wrote her invitations on black-edged paper; she talked incessantly of her broken mother's-heart wearing, as it were, a sort of Niobe nimbus; while, in fact, her display of mourning was nothing more than a last foothold for her vanity. General von Klinger always declared that at the bottom of her heart she was very proud of her son having been run through by a Sempaly.