Lieutenant Bleibtreu sat in a brown study, a few feet away from the players, deep in his melancholy thoughts. The army, his military career, intercourse with his brother officers and their ladies--it was all a grave disappointment to him. His illusions were gone, though it was but a couple of years since he had donned the bright, showy, glittering dragoon uniform, so attractive to the neophyte. He was thinking of home, of his dear, patient, loving mother, whose constant preoccupation he was; of his lovely, self-denying sisters, whose dowry was fast going while he was himself enjoying himself in the “king’s service.” Was he? Was he “enjoying” himself? Was this--this hollow, stupid round of the coarsest pleasures and the equally coarse and stupid round of duties--really what he had looked forward to? The young man sighed. The absence of the wife of his captain, Frau König, rendered him still more melancholy. Bah, it was disgusting. And to think that this was the profession most highly honored, most envied in the fatherland! To think that it had always been drummed in his ears, ever since early childhood, that to “wear the king’s coat” would exalt him high above his fellow mortals! Comradeship! What a fine word when it bears out its full meaning, thought Lieutenant Bleibtreu. But what was it here? What had he found the practical construction of the term? To follow, day by day, step by step, in the same treadmill of dull routine, only relieved by occasional but all too brief glimpses of the freedom that lay beyond “the service”--that was the meaning of comradeship. There was none of that unselfish intimacy, that ready sympathy and help between the members of the caste into which he had risen on the proud day he first read his name among the Kaiser’s appointments in the _Armee-Verordnŭngsblatt_. Dead sea fruit! Ashes that taste bitter on the tongue. Certainly there were exceptions. He himself had heard of some such cases of comradeship as he had dreamed of when still a slim little cadet in the military academy: cases where one comrade lifted the other, the younger and less experienced, up to his higher level; cases where one comrade sacrificed himself for the other. But these must be very rare, he thought, for he had never seen such a case himself. What he had seen was the casting into one stiff, unchanging form of so many individualities not suited to each other. It was the hollow mockery of the thing that palled so on him. And what would be the end?