For more than a dozen years Mme. Virubova lived on terms of closest friendship with the Czarina. She did not live at court, at least she did not until after the murder of Rasputin, when she went to the palace to be near the frightened and despairing Empress. She had a house of her own in Tsarskoe Selo, and it was at her house that the Empress met the monk who was to have such a sinister influence on her after life. The Empress, who was never popular at court, and never happy there, liked to have a place where she could go and throw off her imperial character, be a woman among her intimate friends, care free. Such a refuge was Mme. Virubova’s home to the melancholy Alexandra, wife of the Emperor of all the Russias. Mme. Virubova’s husband was an officer in the navy, and gossip had it that he disapproved of his wife’s friendship with the Empress, and disapproved still more of the people who were invited to meet her in his home. Rasputin was not the only one of the mystics and charlatans she met and talked with, it appears. The Empress was deeply religious, and she was interested in all kinds of strange and mystical doctrines. The husband of Mme. Virubova was not, and he feared, as well he might, that almost any kind of a political plot might be hatched by that “little group of serious thinkers” who met in his drawing room and in the scented boudoir of his wife. They quarreled. It got to the point where they did nothing but quarrel, and one day Mme. Virubova was given a choice between her husband and her friend. She chose the friend, and thenceforth she occupied the house in Tsarskoe Selo alone. The husband went to sea, and after a year or two he died.