The music-hall variety performances, boxing matches, ballets, and garish living-pictures, in which he took pleasure, were abhorrent to Lilly after she had once witnessed them out of curiosity. He declared that wild horses should not drag him again to Shakespeare or Wagner, nor to the concert-room, where Lilly longed to go.
One day Beethoven's Symphony in C Minor was among the announcements--the great work which was associated by a thousand tender ties with her childhood. She said nothing at the time, but afterwards she threw herself on her bed and cried bitterly. When he asked the cause of her grief she told him, and with a laugh he consented to be bored for once, and took her to the concert.
She had not been into a concert-room since her father's last pianoforte recital. She trembled as they took their places, fought back her tears and drew in the atmosphere in deep-drawn draughts.
"You are snorting like a horse when he smells oats," the colonel said jocularly.
"Haven't you noticed that it always smells the same in concert-rooms?" she asked in joyous excitement. "It was just like this in ours at home."
He couldn't remember what the concert-hall atmosphere was like, nor could he remember anything about the Symphony in C Minor.
"It's all rot," he said.
The part of the programme that preceded the Symphony was of no interest to her. She only wanted to listen to the trumpet-blast of fate--the call that she had heard first as she stood on the threshold of womanhood, and had been shaken to the foundations of her soul by a feeling of presentiment. And it came--came and thundered at every heart, and set trembling the knees of all those who were bound up together as fellow-combatants in the struggle against the mighty strokes of fate, and set them writhing as impotently as worms under the spell of a great power and a common fear.
Her husband hummed to himself, half-amused, "Ti-ti-ti-tum." That was all it meant to him: "Ti-ti-ti-tum."
As she turned to rebuke him softly into being quiet, she observed a tuft of yellowish-grey hair sprouting out of the cavity of his ear. She had never noticed it before, and it revolted her.