CHAPTER XIV
They passed Berlin without stopping, because the colonel had no desire to encounter his military friends so soon after his mésalliance. From here in three hours they reached Dresden, and took up their quarters at Sendig's, where the hotel proprietors had arranged to provide the newly-married pair with the comforts and privacy of a home. Drawing-room, bedroom, and dressing-room were all they needed, for the closer their outer intimacy the nearer would their inward relations approximate. And, indeed, the colonel had every reason to be satisfied with his honeymoon. He, who in the course of his not too short life had held hundreds of girls on his knee, who thought he knew every type through and through, the sweetly clinging, the coyly coquettish, the brazenly bold, the sham and the true, and all their different kinds of kisses--this old amorous hand, who ought to have been surprised at nothing, was simply full of incredulous amazement at his last lovely find. In his whole carefully cultivated career as a roué he had never come across so much yielding and so much pride, so much fire, ready wit, and quick understanding, so much naïve simplicity, as were comprised in this one dreamily smiling Madonna-faced child.
Perhaps he was most taken aback and puzzled by her utter unpretentiousness. When they dined à la carte, she invariably selected for herself the very cheapest items on the menu, and would ask if she might have lemonade to drink with as much shy modesty as if she were making a love confession.
Once, on their way back from the public gardens, when they wandered home through queer little back streets, Lilly, who resolutely declined as a rule to look in at shop-windows, stood transfixed before a small greengrocer's. The colonel, on inquiring what interested her, elicited gradually that she loved eating sunflower seeds, and would he mind very much if she bought some?
The mote he loaded her with presents, the less able did she seem to realise that money was being spent on her account. So long had been the dearth of money in her life, that now she had no discrimination as to the value of it. However big the sum he placed in her purse, she did not hesitate to hand it out to the first beggar they met. But when he paid a flower-girl two marks for a rose she thought it wicked extravagance.
Once when she had tickled his fastidious palate beyond belief by her naïveté, he asked in sudden distrust, "I say, little woman, are you acting?"
She didn't know what he meant, and with the wide melancholy eyes of childlike innocence, which she used to turn on him at such questions, she replied, "Acting indeed! Since papa went away I haven't seen any acting, or been inside a theatre once."
The same day he took a box for the play, and she danced about the room with the little blue tickets in her hand, half mad with delight. But her joyous enthusiasm was somewhat damped by being told that the occasion demanded evening dress. It was incomprehensible to her that to appreciate Shakespeare's "Winter's Tale" you should be obliged to bare your neck and shoulders. The evening gowns, besides, seemed far too grand for her. In selecting one to wear, she hovered round them with their glittering, jewelled trimmings and exquisite lace as gingerly as if they were a bed of nettles. In a generous mood the colonel had ordered the gowns, for no particular reason, for to take Lilly into society as yet was not to be thought of.
When she came to him dressed, stiff and stern-eyed from embarrassment, yet glowing with a feverish joy in her finery, taller and more of a budding Venus than ever, her delicate rounded breast half hidden in a mass of soft lace, the fabulously beautiful chain of pearls on her swan-like throat, the elderly robber went into such ecstasies over his booty that he was near ordering the finery back into the wardrobe, and throwing the theatre tickets into the waste-paper basket; but she implored him so fervently to keep his promise that he thought better of it and got into the carriage with her.
Then, he, who imagined he had long ago outlived the commonplace vanity of delighting to show off his possessions in public, experienced a triumph. The blasé old bachelor found himself enjoying the sensation of being envied, and, though he accepted it disdainfully as a matter of course, he was tremendously flattered.