his susceptible heart.

Frau Kahle, as a flower girl, was flirting desperately with the
younger men. She also played her part very well, for the champagne in
which she had liberally indulged began to exert its effects.
Lieutenant Kolberg, as a modish dandy, had already purchased nearly
her entire supply of flowers, and when, soon after, the remnant had
gone, he claimed and obtained her as his partner for the dance.

Frau Captain Stark alone did not seem to belong in this _milieu_. The
choice of a costume, to begin with, had occasioned her deep and
anxious thought. She felt that to follow her inclinations and appear
at the masquerade in either the guise of a ballet dancer or of a
flower girl would too markedly invite criticism. Her fifty years and
her towering shape would really have made her too conspicuous in such
parts. On the other hand, to show herself as a peddler woman or
fishwife would have, so she feared, made her look "too natural."
Having, therefore, discarded these notions, her fancy roved in the
realms of the beautiful and fantastic, until it settled down upon a
costume which, bespangled and with its garland of rushes, she declared
to be that of a "mermaid of middle age." Nobody was in a condition to
contradict her, inasmuch as nobody recollected ever having seen a
"middle-aged" mermaid before. She floated, as a matter of fact, in a
cloud of pink and sea-green laces. The capacious bosom this cloud
concealed from view rolled and heaved quite realistically, thus
producing the effect of ocean waves, and her enormous arms were
awe-inspiring enough to keep away all evening those in the crowd who
had not got their sea-legs,--and that meant practically all the
younger officers. At all other times her most dutiful slaves, these
young men seemed to have conspired to leave the dreaded chief of the
regiment's nominal chief severely alone. Of course she felt this as an
unpardonable offence, and this all the more as the colonel at an early
hour was in an irresponsible condition, and hence listened to her
violent plaint with stolid equanimity.

There was a male trio, too, that claimed some attention. They
represented to the life merry, devil-may-care vagabonds, and so well
did they act their parts that one would have supposed they had just
been picked up on the miry highway outside. They deemed it, of course,
strictly within their privileges to get drunk with all due speed,--an
endeavor in which they admirably succeed