ANNA WYRUBEWA APPEARS ON THE SCENE AND HE SAW HER PASS After the disastrous Philippe incident, the character of the Empress Alexandra changed considerably. She became a sullen, morose, melancholy woman, with a grudge against the world in general and the people with whom she lived in particular. Her sisters-in-law, the Grand-Duchess Xenia Alexandrowna and the Grand-Duchess Olga of Oldenburg, tried to come to her help and to enliven her by attempting to bring her out of the solitude in which she shut herself up, and if she would only have responded to these efforts it is possible that the whole course of her life might have run differently. But the Empress persisted in seeing enemies in everyone of her relatives, and, instead of trying to break through this wall of hostility with which she believed herself surrounded, she used all her powers of persuasion to induce her husband to take the same attitude of antagonism in regard to his family which she had adopted herself. Of course this was not forgiven her. Nicholas II.’s sisters, who loved him dearly, were affronted when they discovered that their former intimate relations with their brother had come to an end, and that for some reason or other he looked upon them with suspicious eyes. Xenia simply shrugged her shoulders, and, being very wisely advised by her husband, the Grand-Duke Alexander Michaylovitch, who, like all the members of that branch of the Romanoff family, was exceedingly intelligent, refrained from saying anything. But Olga, who was of a more enterprising turn of mind, accosted the Czar one day and talked to him quite seriously about the conduct of the Empress, pointing out to him the harm which she was doing him by her rudeness toward the members of the Imperial Family, and expressing the conviction that times were sufficiently serious. This was during the Japanese war. The Emperor listened to her, as he listened to everybody who spoke to him, with courtesy and attention, but the only reply which she could obtain from him was to the effect that the Empress was in a bad state of health, that her nerves were quite unstrung, and that it would be wrong to take anything she said or did too seriously. “But you are not nervous or ill,” exclaimed the Grand Duchess. “How does it come, then, that you avoid us, your sisters, and even our mother just as much as does your wife. What have we done to you, except to love you, for you to treat us as if we were strangers?” Nicholas II. pulled his mustache, but would not explain himself further, and Olga Alexandrowna had to own herself baffled.