It might have been thought that she was stupid and lacking in animation if occasionally she had not thawed under the influence of champagne, which was capable of working an amazing revolution in her. Then she seemed gradually to awake from her torpor, her eyes grew brilliant, her cheeks rosy. She would laugh shrilly and say madly improper things, even repeating the colonel's old Casino jokes, till as last she was worked up into a state of rapture, in which she sang comic songs in a tremulous twittering falsetto, mimicked well-known actors and actresses, and even broke into more daring dances than were ever seen on the variety stage. It was extraordinary how retentive her memory was. Without knowing it, she never forgot anything that she had once heard. In her normal condition she remembered less than other people. Wine had first to sweep away the barriers of reserve which, as a rule, dammed her flow of wit. Her associates soon discovered this phenomenal peculiarity in her, and tried by a hundred devices to bring her into a condition that provided them with such rare entertainment. But she resisted with all her strength, and so she waged a perpetual warfare in which she could not count on Richard as an ally, for he liked his fair mistress to be applauded for her talent as well as admired for her beauty. The next day she invariably felt limp and depressed, and sometimes when her mind's horizon was bounded by a red forest of high kicking legs, and the silly patter of suggestive songs rang in her head, a low voice of exhortation made itself heard within her. "_Once_ you were different," it said. "Once you looked up to the heights and aspired to better things." But she dared not listen to this voice.... She felt she was unworthy because she was defenceless and had no one to hold out to her a protecting hand. Sometimes, on the nights that she was free to do as she pleased, she slipped out, as if she were doing something wrong, and went to the gallery of a good theatre where she would not be known, or to the orchestra of a concert-hall where music students of both sexes congregated, sitting on steps and railings with the score on their knees, following every note. What she saw and heard made no deep impression on her. She felt disquieted and out of her element, and fixed her attention on some young man, whose bold profile or mass of artistic curls struck her fancy. "He is one of the gifted," she thought, with a torturing pain at her heart, and she gazed at him so long and earnestly with languishing eyes that at last he returned her glance with fiery fervour. Yet, however hotly she might burn with eagerness to be spoken to by him, she dared not give him further signals of encouragement, with Frau Jula's awful example before her mind's eye.... And so she had to rest content with the beating of her heart, which in itself alone caused her delight.