ardt. He stood with his back against a window-frame, almost
enveloped in the flowing red silk curtain, so that scarcely any one
noticed him. His curls had been shorn, and his thick dark hair only
just waved, otherwise nothing was changed in his appearance since the
Hornberg days. His black eyes wandered thoughtfully over the changing
picture before him. The expression on his face, now slightly
melancholy, bore more resemblance to that of a young Christian devotee
than to that of the beautiful Antinous, and the intoxication of the
gayety around him appealed so little to him, that not once did he beat
his foot, nod his head, or move a muscle in time to the satanic music
of the Parisian enchanter.

For the first time in his life Wilhelm found himself in fashionable
society, and for the first time he wore evening dress. Certainly to
look at him no one would have guessed it, for there was no awkwardness
in his manner, not a trace of the anxiety and inability to do the right
thing, which in most men placed amid new surroundings and in
unaccustomed dress would have been so apparent. He wore his evening
dress with the same natural self-possession as one of the gray-haired
diplomats. The secret of this demeanor was the sense of equality he
felt toward the others. It never occurred to him to think, "How do I
look? Am I like everyone else?" and so he was as free from constraint
in his dress coat as in his student's jacket. He had even the
gracefulness which every man has in the flower of his age, if he allows
the unconscious impulses of his limbs to assert themselves, and does
not spoil the freedom of their play by confusing efforts to improve
them. The company did not disconcert him either, in spite of their
epaulettes and orders, and titles thick as falling snowflakes. An
impression received in his boyhood came back to him, in which he, among
strange people in a foreign land, had been accustomed by his father to
consider himself as an onlooker. In Moscow he had often met
aristocratic people, with as thick epaulettes, and more orders than
these, but at the sight of them he had always thought, "They are only
barbarous Russians, and I am a German, although I have no gold lace on
my coat." From that time he had always in his mind connected the use of
uniforms, as outward signs of bravery, with the conception of an
ostentatious and showy barbarism which a civilized European might
afford to laugh at. He had gone further; he regarded r