Then Regie Lister who was a Secretary of Legation, let slip to the Crown Princess that we were getting up an entertainment for (and with) sailors and English governesses, and she, under promise of discretion as regards her relatives, was allowed to be one of the English governesses. With truly Teutonic perfidiousness, she informed all the Kings and Queens then in Athens what was going on, and just as the curtain was about to go up for _The Duchess of Bayswater_ a message came from the palace that the entire host of royalties was then starting to attend it. And so there was a row of Kings and Queens and ten rows of English governesses, and a swarm of English sailors. But we refused to cut out a topical allusion to the Palace bugles. And at precisely this point, the epoch of those absurd theatricals, the sparkle and comedy of Athenian existence was overshadowed or enlightened for me by the birth of a great friendship. Regie Lister had the greatest genius for friendship of any man I ever met; no one, not even Alfred Lyttelton, had a finer gift or a more irresistible charm for men and women alike. The two, extraordinarily dissimilar in most respects, were identical in this, that they compelled others to love them, because they loved so magnificently themselves. Alfred Lyttelton, for all his exuberant virility, had the feminine quality of giving himself instead of taking, which is what I mean by magnificent love, and Regie’s genius in friendship sprang from precisely the same abandonment. There they diverged north and south, for Regie had practically none of the manliness that was so characteristic of the other. But he had superbly the qualities of his defects; in matters of intellect, the direct masculine attack was represented by intuition and diplomacy and extreme quickness, and in matters of affection by a certain robust tenderness, quite devoid of sentimentality. All mankind, whether male or female, is compounded of both sexes: the man without any womanly instincts would be a mere monster; the woman without any grit of manliness in her, a mere jelly-fish, and in Regie’s nature the woman had a large share. One quality supposed to be a defect of women rather than men he was quite without: he had no notion whatever of “spite,” and was incapable of taking revenge on anyone who had annoyed or crossed him. Most shining of all among his delightful gifts was his instinct of seeing the best in everyone. Wherever he went in his diplomatic posts, Athens, Constantinople, Copenhagen, Rome, Paris, or Tangiers, he found, without the least “setting to work” about it, that there never was so heavenly a place, nor so delightful an entourage. At heart he was really Parisian; that city, with its keen kaleidoscopic gaiety, its intellectual and artistic atmosphere, dry and defined as its own air, suited him best, but this instinct to find everyone with whom he came in contact delightful, brought out, as was natural, all that there was delightful