I found a jolly companion in the person of my cousin Nathaly Staritzki. One evening we went to see _La Traviata_ sung in Armenian, which rather disagreed with Italian music. Nathaly was, like me, easily moved to laughter. As the opera proceeded we became more and more hilarious, and our behaviour was such that caused many disapproving glances to be cast in our direction. At the most pathetic moment, when the prima-donna breathed her last breath, we ran out of our box, putting our handkerchiefs to our mouths and overturning the chairs on our passage. I used to see a great deal of the Persian princes; Rouknadine-Mirza was rapidly losing his heart to me. One day we went out riding together, and whilst our horses were galloping at full speed, the idea came to me to make my page gather a wild flower growing in the grass. He managed to do it, but during that acrobatic exercise his _casque_ rolled off, and instead of treating him commiseratingly I only snubbed him for his pains. Horsemanship was my ruling passion. I easily found partners to accompany me in my rides, and careered through the streets of Tiflis, followed by my cavaliers, enjoying to overtake them like a cyclone. I cantered home in high spirits, with a heated face and my hair coming down, most of it outside my cap, not in it. I frequently brought my cavaliers home to tea, and if they didn’t happen to be particularly interesting, I proceeded straight to bed, and the Staritzkis had to sit with my guests and entertain them as best they could, whilst I slept the sleep of the just. One day, in turning over an album, I came upon a photograph the sight of which made me exclaim: “Oh, who is that good-looking officer?” “That is Serge Michailovitch Doukhovskoy, a young general attached to the person of the Grand-Duke Michael, commander-in-chief of the army of the Caucasus,” said my aunt Roerberg. She told me that he was the youngest general in the Russian army, being only six-and-thirty years old, that he had a splendid career before him, and was in short everything desirable; she added that now I had a capital opportunity of making a brilliant match, and that I must spread my net to catch that big fish and set immediately to work to captivate him. That was enough to set me against the general; there was something very distasteful in the idea of such a marriage, and I was not at all willing to sacrifice my youth to the advantage of rank and money.