colored embodiment was reflected on the white hands of the guests,
and carried their imaginations away in its flight from gray reality
to the immortal land of rosy dreams.

The meal lasted a long time, then a few of the guests rose; the
older ones, who had principally chatted, played, and smoked before
midnight, now withdrew, if they had no daughters to chaperon; the
young people, however, went back to the dancing-room, the musicians
fiddled anew as if they were possessed, and an hour's cotillion was
begun, the pretty quick-moving figures being led by a lieutenant of
the Guards, who seemed as proud of the honor as if he were
commanding on a battlefield. Loulou, who had gone back to the dance,
had begged Wilhelm in vain to take part at least in the cotillion,
where he need not dance much. She had assured him that he would be
more decorated than any other man in the room, and would have more
orders, ribbons, and wreaths given him than all the lieutenants put
together; but even the prospect of such a triumph could not make him
ambitious, and for the first time this evening the beautiful excited
girl left him looking out of humor, and glanced at him in a way
which was not merely sorrowful but reproachful. Paul, on the other
hand, was happy. He kept more than ever near the pretty
insignificant girl with whom he had danced so much, and the good-
hearted fellow did not feel in the least jealous when, in the long
pause of the cotillion, his partner went to speak to his friend who
had stood lonely for so long, and had hardly enjoyed himself at all.
Paul was sufficiently decorated; he got a sufficient number of
glances from girls' bright eyes to be quite contented, he paid a
sufficient number of compliments, great and small, for which he was
thanked by sweet smiles, and perhaps with tiny sighs, and he had the
feeling that he had lived in every fiber of his being, and that his