Queen Olga was Russian, daughter of the Grand Duke Constantine, a wonderfully beautiful woman, whom I had seen first when I came up from Marlborough for the Jubilee of Queen Victoria in 1887. She had an engaging habit when she came round the room at balls or after dinner in order to talk to the guests, of putting her hands on the shoulders of the women she was conversing with, and shoving them back into their seats, so that they should sit down without ceremony. Sometimes she would want to talk to two or three people together, and down they would go like ninepins, while she stood. Behind her came the King still playing seesaw, and behind him the Crown Prince, who did the same to the men he wanted to talk to, and a little while afterwards there was Prince George and Princess Marie, both putting people into their places. It was all very democratic, but also slightly embarrassing, because after large Prince George had pushed you back into a low chair, you had to crane your head up, as if you were talking to somebody on the top of the dome of St. Paul’s, the dome inverted being represented by his tremendous and circular waistcoat. After him came Prince Nicholas, but he had always something terribly important and slightly broad, in the shape perhaps of a “Limerick,” to communicate. So as these could not be shouted, conversation was held on more reasonable levels. King George’s family, as all the world knows, had made magnificent marriages. He was the brother of Queen Alexandra, and of the Dowager Empress of Russia, and his eldest son had brought as wife to Athens the German Emperor’s sister, to whom, I suspect, these bugle-regulations were due. The “in-laws” consequently were often being bugled for, and the tram to Phaleron on a Sunday afternoon would now be a fine target for Bolsheviks. The Crown Princess was constantly engaged during these years on her wifely duties, and the arrival of the Empress Frederick in Athens usually implied that there would soon be fireworks in Constitution Square. But when I write of her, there is no _opera-bouffe_ atmosphere that I can attempt or desire to reproduce, for tragic were her past years, bitter her present years, and grim agonies of mortal disease were already making ambush for her. During the three or four ensuing years, when, instead of being at the British School or at a hotel, I spent some months at the British Legation, where Sir Edwin Egerton was Minister, I found myself on strangely personal terms with her. She had been a friend of an uncle of mine, who became a nationalized German after years of living in Wiesbaden, and starting from that, she talked with a curious unrestraint. Bitter little stinged remarks came out, “You are happy in being English”; or “When I come to London I am only a visitor.” On one occasion I was left alone with her on a terrace above the outlying rooms at the Legation, and to my profound discomfort, she began pacing up and down with smothered ejaculations.