I have always regretted that my Imperial mistress was not able to make for herself friends among her own relatives. This partiality which she always exhibited in regard to her Hessian connections was a very unfortunate one, and added certainly to her unpopularity. Had she been wise, she might easily have found a warm support in the Czar’s sister, the Grand Duchess Xenia, and the latter’s husband, whose kind feelings in regard to her would have secured for her the allegiance of all the sons of the Grand Duke Michael, the great uncle of the Czar, and the most respected member of the Romanoff family, as well as the oldest. Unfortunately she did not see the necessity for doing so, and she feared the influence undoubtedly exercised at one time over the Czar’s mind by Xenia, his favourite sister. Consequently she kept her at arm’s length, and avoided inviting her to Czarskoi Selo. The Imperial family, finding itself snubbed at every step, boycotted in its turn their Empress, with the result that the latter drifted every day a little farther from those who ought to have been her natural friends and supporters. The Grand Duchess Vladimir, herself a German Princess and by birth a Duchess of Mecklenburg, had at one time been the one to whom Alexandra Feodorovna had been the most attracted, and a certain intimacy had even established itself between them. Then one day the Princess, when calling on her niece, had found established in her room one of the numerous nuns with whom the latter liked to surround herself and who had been presented to her by her sister Elizabeth. She had made a few remarks as to inadvisability of an Empress of Russia admitting into such close intimacy an uneducated woman, who, moreover, was probably like all Russian nuns, devoted to gossip. These remarks were very badly received and put an end to a friendship that, in spite of the many inconveniences it presented (the Grand Duchess Vladimir being an active supporter of the Kaiser and of the German party at Court), would still have been preferable to the one which continued to persist between Alexandra Feodorovna and any amount of ignorant monks and nuns whose society she grew at last to prefer to that of everybody else. This, however, was not saying much, because as time went on my mistress developed more and more this unfortunate love for solitude for which she was so often, and not unjustly, reproached. She had a great defect for a woman in her high position—that of taking life too seriously, in the sense that she would never admit that any one had the right to seek amusement or relaxation from the duties of one’s daily existence. Indeed she looked out for duties, and found some where none existed. She hated balls, and society she thoroughly despised, believing that it was composed of frivolous and ill-natured people. She did not care for innocent pleasures, not because she had any preference for others, but because she was convinced that every single hour of any man’s or