It was a big, crowded room we entered. But I did not see the people. I paid no attention to anybody. I saw nothing but the estrade on which the piano was placed. Our seats were so far to the right that, small as I was, I should not have seen the pianist at all had I not obtained my mother’s permission to establish my diminutive person in the passage left between the two rows of seats, where I had a full view of the keyboard. I was all eyes, all ears, quivering from head to foot with intense nervous expectation. At last Madame Schumann came in, and, advancing swiftly to the instrument, sat down before it. She was dressed in black velvet, with a single deep-red rose stuck low behind one ear in her dark hair, which was very thick and inclined to curl, and which she wore plainly parted and flat to the head, instead of having it according to the fashion of those days twisted to stand out on each side of the face. What struck me at once was something harmonious in her whole appearance; it always seemed to me afterwards as if her dress must have been crimson too, to match the rose in her hair. Her hands were small, firm and plump, the touch full, healthy and vigorous, almost of virile strength. I carried the rich, clear tones away with me, to ring in my ears for long afterwards. But that which went straight to my heart, and haunted me longer still, was the pathetic look in her eyes. Leaning a little forward, bending as it were over the keys, as if to be alone with her own music and the better to hear herself, apparently utterly oblivious of the rest of the world, the player kept her magnificent, melancholy eyes persistently cast down. But I could see those wonderful eyes, and her sadness impressed me so much that it almost spoilt my pleasure in the music, for I was wondering all the time how it could be that anyone who played so divinely could all the same look so unutterably sad. I did not then know her unhappy story; I had not heard how her husband had gone out of his mind, leaving her penniless, with a large family to provide for, and that it was, indeed, to provide her children’s daily bread that she thus played in public. It did not occur to me that anyone could be poor who wore a velvet dress. Besides it was impossible to my childish mind to conceive that any artist could be poor. On the contrary, I looked upon them all as being fabulously rich, as having all the treasures of the universe at their disposal. Those beliefs were natural to my age, for in childhood Romance is Reality, and Reality a very poor sort of Romance! Have we not been all of us the heroes of our own fairy-tales?--either Aladdin or Robinson Crusoe, and more often Crusoe on his island than Aladdin in the magic cave, since at that time of life the riches of this world appeal very feebly to our imagination.