In this environment of human beings, amid these
excited young men with their healthful, sunburnt faces, he, with his
impassive, reserved expression and somewhat listless bearing, looked
strangely weary and worn. A woman's eye gazing at the group of
officers would scarcely have regarded him with favour; a man's would
have singled him out as the most intellectual of them all.
Removing his helmet and wiping the perspiration from his forehead with
his handkerchief, he displayed a head on which the hair was already
growing thin and, at the same time, a well-kept, aristocratic hand,
with long, thin, bloodless fingers. His whole appearance, even in the
levelling uniform, revealed a man of exalted rank. And, in fact, this
officer was Prince Louis of Hochstein-Falkenburg-Gerau, the head of a
non-reigning line of a German princely race.
Orphaned at an early age, he found himself at eighteen when, by the
rules of his House, he attained his majority, in the unrestricted
possession of a yearly income of several millions. From his mother, a
very fine musician, he inherited artistic tastes and a keen
appreciation of the beautiful; from his haughty and somewhat eccentric
father a rugged, independent nature, which found every external
constraint intolerable and wished to obey only the law of its own will.
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