Lilly had never before been in a box, and on entering she had started back instinctively, feeling confused and alarmed. But accustomed as she now was to implicit obedience, she took the chair to which the colonel pointed without a word of protest. When she realised she was the object of general attention, the old numbness came over her. She felt as if the woman sitting there speaking and smiling were not herself but someone else whose connection with her person was purely accidental. She did not awake from her torpor until the hall was thrown into darkness again, and the curtain went up. Then the play wafted her to the land of the poet, breathless, exulting, dismayed. After this, two Lillies sat in her seat--the one in blissful self-forgetfulness flitting on the rainbow-coloured wings of childlike fancy through heavens and hells; the other making precise gestures like a wound-up doll, unconsciously imitating the manners of the well-bred; at the same time feeling a strange, hot, torturingly sweet sensation creep over her being: the intoxication of the vain. The triumph he had celebrated in the theatre was not enough for the colonel. On returning to the hotel he did not have supper served as usual in their rooms, but led Lilly to the general dining room, where a gypsy band was playing and elegant folk of all descriptions were spreading their peacock feathers. The game of the box was repeated in all but one respect. Lilly, carried away by the dreamy magic of the violins, dropped some of her coyness. Her cheeks glowed, her eyes swam, and stretching herself a bit she ventured to take a tiny part in the sport. Two tables off sat a blond young man in full dress--white shirt front and black tie like all the others. He kept staring at her with hot persistence, as if she were a strange animal. She moved uneasily under this gaze, which caressed and gave hurt, which spoke wild words in a foreign tongue, yet was nothing else than that sob of the violins which feverishly quivered through her limbs, up and down her body. Suddenly her husband faced about and surprised the admirer in the very act. He stabbed him with one of his piercing glances, and soon the miscreant vanished. The colonel's mood seemed to be spoiled somewhat. He said, "It's time to go," and led her upstairs. When he had her to himself, joy in his possession got the upper hand again, mounting to a sort of triumphal ecstasy. Others might pasture on the delights of her evening attire; the winsome asperity of her childlike features, on which life had not yet left its traces, were good enough for display down there in the dining room--off with the pearl chain! Down with the laces! He wanted her without covering of any sort, wanted to drink in with greedy eyes the secret of her proudly blooming body, wanted to satiate his hungry old age with the long-forbidden charms of strange, stolen youth.