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 rank and titles as only a kind of clothing of circumstances, which the State lends to certain persons for useful purposes, just as the wardrobe-keeper at a theater gives out costumes to the supers. He was so convinced on this point that he felt sure it was only the stupid yokel at the back of the gallery who could look with any admiration on a human being merely because he struts about the stage in purple and gold tinsel. Wilhelm did not give the impression of a man who was enjoying himself. His discontented gaze persistently followed one dark head adorned with a yellow rose.