She scorned to show weakness.

The huge square box, parquet-floored and high-ceilinged, had been arranged to display a suite of bedroom furniture designed and made in the halcyon days of the last quarter of the nineteenth century, when modish taste was just due to go clean out of fashion for the best part of the next hundred years.

I thought you inherited your money. / I did, old sport, he said automatically, but I lost most of it in the big panic—the panic of the war.

Since the Holocaust, fantasies of Jewish power are no longer Salonfähig, no longer openly expressible in “polite” society—at least in Western Europe and North America—even if continuities also persist in antisemitic thinking as do traumatic aftereffects for Jews around the world.