Summer, 1873. The brief romance was not forgotten, but the sharp pain of it was assuaged. The love borne “on the pinions of song” had not made too deep an impression on my heart; the whole affair had passed swiftly by and vanished like a dream. I spent a few weeks in deep, genuine grief; then the tears began gradually to dry up, and life again made its rights prevail—and all the more powerfully as the necessity was upon me to earn my own livelihood. Our property was quite used up; I was obliged to leave home. My mother could live on her widow’s portion, but I did not want to be a burden upon her, although she entreated me to stay with her and once more attempt to take up my artistic career. Of that I would hear positively nothing more. Thirty years old—that is no time to begin an artistic career; and the remembrance of the pangs that I had suffered through nervousness, the various fiascoes connected with my tests, made the mere thought of “Singsang,” as I called it, detestable. Neither was I willing to remain inactive at home in narrow circumstances, and grow sour. I wanted to see more of the world; I wanted to accomplish some work. With my perfect command of French, English, and Italian, with my superior artistry in music, unusual in one not a professional, with my extensive acquirements in other branches of knowledge, I could make myself useful and brilliant in the outside world. So I took a position that was offered to me as instructor and companion to four grown-up daughters in the baronial house of Suttner. Here was I first to win the crown of my life. Blessed be the day that brought me to that house; it was the bud from which the hundred-leaved rose of my good fortune opened out. That day also opened the door through which there could enter that Bertha Suttner whom, with her experiences of the purest married bliss and the deepest woes of widowhood, with her participation in the critical issues of the time, I feel myself to be to-day, while that Bertha Kinsky of whom I have hitherto been writing hovers before me like a figure in a picture book, whose adventures—in vague outlines—are indeed known to me, but do not affect me. The Suttner family occupied their own _palais_ in Canova Street, Vienna. One side looked out on the Karlskirche across the Vienna River, the other on the Musikverein building. We—that is to say the baron, the baroness, the four daughters, and I—occupied the first floor; in the mezzanine lived the oldest son Karl, who had been married a few months previously to a marvelously beautiful woman born Countess Firmian, and the third and youngest son Artur Gundaccar. The second son, likewise married, a former captain of cavalry, who had fought in Bohemia in 1866, lived on the manor of Stockern.