This system of having eight maids was continued for about ten years or so, then one of them died, and another one asked to be relieved from her duties, and they were never replaced. The Czarina thought that it was quite sufficient for her to have six attendants, and she abolished the night waiting, which had always been so irksome to the people concerned in it. She used to dismiss her maids at eleven o’clock and then retire to her bedroom, where she read or worked alone, but did not require any more attendance, except in case she felt ill or one of her children was indisposed. She was exacting, but never unjust or cruel, and she hated to be the cause of inconvenience to other people. At first she had never dared to alter anything in the customs of the Russian Court, but later on she asserted herself and made many changes in the interior arrangements of the Palace, all of which were practical and tended to the amelioration of the condition of her numerous servants, who nevertheless did not show themselves grateful to her for her anxiety about their welfare, and who in the hour of her misfortune mostly abandoned her, or turned with alacrity against her. CHAPTER X THE CZARINA AND ST. PETERSBURG SOCIETY At the time of her marriage St. Petersburg society was well disposed toward my unfortunate mistress, and it would have been easy for her to have made herself popular. Unfortunately she had, as I have said, a sarcastic tongue, and made no secret of her likes and dislikes; nor did she hesitate to ridicule certain customs to which old and important dowagers clung with persistency. She always feared to be thought too familiar, owing to the fact that the Imperial family, from the very first day of her arrival in Russia, had drilled into her ears the caution that St. Petersburg was not Darmstadt, and that the free and easy manners of a little German town would be out of place at the Court of the mighty Czar of All the Russias. She had therefore fallen into the other extreme, and disciplined herself to be as stiff as possible. The Empress Marie had been in the habit of receiving in her own private boudoir the ladies who craved an audience from her, and of asking them to sit beside her. Her daughter-in-law made it a point to give her audience standing, and to converse for a few minutes without ever offering a chair to the old women who had applied for the honour of an introduction to her. She coldly extended to them her hand to kiss, which further incensed them, and her natural shyness, added to this stiff reception, of course made her many enemies. She began to be criticized, and that in no friendly spirit. Unfortunately she became aware of this, and it set her from the very first against the people she ought to have tried to make her friends. Then gossip, and that mostly ill natured, too, did its work, and all kinds of anecdotes were put into circulation concerning the want of kindness of the young Empress.