Not that she was really clear in her mind with regard to these defects of his qualities. If she had been, it is possible that she might have loathed and despised him. She was too young and ignorant of the world to know that life is like a witch's cauldron, which brews out of the souls of all men much the same mess, when ideals bleach with their hair and they have no altar on which to gain salvation through sacrifice. The pictures her imagination painted of him faded and shifted from day to day, first in one direction, then in another, until something like pity mingled with her childlike respectful awe of him, and a certain motherliness that would have been unnatural, had it not had its foundations in the goodness of heart that found in the weaknesses of others an object for its fostering care. Ah! if only she did not long for so much. Every day she sat at a sumptuously spread table and longed for more! She read eagerly every morning the notices posted up in the vestibule of the hotel, giving a list of the evening's amusements. But the colonel would hurry her on--in the narrow groove of his small garrison he and the arts had become estranged. The organs necessary for the enjoyment of such things from long disuse had become decayed, and he shrank from the mental exertion required to galvanise them into activity once more. The music-hall variety performances, boxing matches, ballets, and garish living-pictures, in which he took pleasure, were abhorrent to Lilly after she had once witnessed them out of curiosity. He declared that wild horses should not drag him again to Shakespeare or Wagner, nor to the concert-room, where Lilly longed to go. One day Beethoven's Symphony in C Minor was among the announcements--the great work which was associated by a thousand tender ties with her childhood. She said nothing at the time, but afterwards she threw herself on her bed and cried bitterly. When he asked the cause of her grief she told him, and with a laugh he consented to be bored for once, and took her to the concert. She had not been into a concert-room since her father's last pianoforte recital. She trembled as they took their places, fought back her tears and drew in the atmosphere in deep-drawn draughts. "You are snorting like a horse when he smells oats," the colonel said jocularly. "Haven't you noticed that it always smells the same in concert-rooms?" she asked in joyous excitement. "It was just like this in ours at home." He couldn't remember what the concert-hall atmosphere was like, nor could he remember anything about the Symphony in C Minor. "It's all rot," he said.