Extreme Magic

Authors: Hortense Calisher

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“Since the other guests, though moist and perfervid, were still upright in their chairs and conversation, the incident caused, even in that imperturbable company, a certain silence. Chitchat, suddenly quenched, faded off into one of those pauses where isolated sentences stand out sharply. The man on my left, whom I had placed tentatively as either a connoisseur of heraldry or a baiter of Americans, had been lecturing me on the purity of lineage maintained by German nobility up to the last war. “...Where else,” he had just inquired, “can one find, even now, a person whose line shows sixteen quarterings?” Then he stopped short, as if contradicted by circumstance. Headily I reassured myself that quite without knowing it—and in the first week too—I must have scaled one of those dizzily international heights of society so often promised the provincial: a set so patrician that queens had no legs, emperors might be clothed exactly as they said they were, and ladies appeared in their quarterings without shame.MoreLess Read More Read Less