“We will premise that she is thirty-three,” confidently began the musician, “or even thirty-five. When I was a young fool at Warsaw, eighteen years old,” he babbled. “I was the local prodigy. My first essays in public were, of course, concerts, and I was soon the vogue. And, later, asked as an artistic guest to the chateaux of the nobility in Poland, Kowno, Vitebsk, Wilna, Minsk, Grodno and Volhynia. I was a poet in thought, a lover of all womankind in my dreams, and a conspirator in the inmost chambers of my defiant Polish nature.” “They made me the cat’s-paw of adroit adventurers who were filling their pockets from wealthy Polish sympathizers in France and America, and some of them were Russian paid spies. I braved all the risks. I was the secret means of communication of the highest circles of our cult of Rebellion. Fool that I was, wandering from province to province, I lived the life of a mad enthusiast. The proud memories of Poland were mine, the spirit of her music, arts, and poetry had cast its witchery over me. Her history, the tragedy of a crownless queen of sorrows, had transported me into a dreamy idealism. I was soon the confidant of our seductive mobile Polish beauties. Sinuous, insincere, changeful, passionate, and burning with the flames of Love and Life, I was, at once, their idol and their plaything, their hero, and their willing slave. “For then, the spirit of old Poland rang out in my numbers, and I waked the quivering echoes of woman’s heart at will. It was in seventy-three that I was sent on a special mission to Prince Pierre Troubetskoi’s splendid chateau at Jitomir in Volhynia. The crafty Russians were watching us even there, and were busied in assembling troops secretly, at Kiev and Wilna. To another was given the proud place of secret spy over the higher circles of Wilna, while my duty was to watch Jitomir and Kiev. Troubetskoi was a bold gallant fellow, an ardent Muscovite, and had secretly returned from a long sojourn in Paris. He was in close touch with the Governors of Volhynia, Kiev, and Podolia, and we feared his sword within, his Parisian connections without. An evil star brought me into his household as his guest. For nearly a year I was kept vibrating between the points of danger to us, my personal headquarters being at the Chateau of Jitomir. And there I lived out my brief heart-life, for there I met Valerie Troubetskoi. No one seemed to know where Pierre had found her, but later I learned her story from her own lips. “That is, all of the story of a woman’s heart-life which is ever unveiled to any man! She was beautiful beyond--compare, her wistful tenderness shining out as the moon, softer than the fierce noonday glare of the passion-transfigured faces of our Polish beauties. For they loved, for Love’s own sake, and Valerie Troubetskoi offered up the chalice of her own heart in silent sadness. I never saw so lovely a being.”