Word: ulrika
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Dates: during 1924-1924
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...Ulrika Woytich, a young woman with an irresistible personality, a consuming ambition and a total lack of scruples, comes up to Vienna "on the make." It is her intention to windlass the family fortune out of a miserly and almost?not quite?inhuman old uncle who has previously cheated her father and would apparently prefer to see her starve to death. It is in the midst of this undertaking, however, that accident opens a more brilliant prospect. The family of Helmut Mylius, a curio dealer, has been kept by him in a state of semi-starvation, shabbiness and sullen despair...
...Ulrika piles up a fortune on commissions out of the general flood of money, after she has thoroughly demoralized the children?the only son develops into a degenerate?and brought the rest of her own family and friends to feed at the trough. Only one daughter, Josephine Mylius, withstands the influence, and a battle ensues between the wicked, but clever, and the good, but dumb, which concludes at the end of Part I with the defeat of Josephine. She is unable, in a world wholly full of rottenness and decay, to find her own feet; and Ulrika achieves her most...
Forty years later the same battle is renewed. Josephine's life has been ruined, although she is the wealthy widow of a man who had become a Baron and died at the height of his glory. Ulrika's life has simply been lived?she has had a good time, but it is over, and she has retired to her country house to hoard, with what is apparently a congenial avariciousness among Viennese, the fortune she has amassed. And then the author introduces the extraordinarily beautiful, self-possessed and unspotted grandchild of Josephine. The two women fight for her and Josephine...