With the women of the aristocracy he was well-known, but to the Imperial Court he had not risen. Yet, being a _protege_ of Kouropatkine, matters were no doubt being arranged, although I was, of course, in ignorance of the traitorous plans in progress. On the following morning, according to my instructions given me by my new chief, I called upon him at the small ground-floor flat which he occupied in the Poltavskaya, close to the Nicholas Station. The house, the remaining rooms of which were unoccupied, was a dark forbidding-looking one, with a heavy door beneath a portico, and containing deep cellars into which nobody ever penetrated save the Starets himself. On the morning of my first visit there, I was, from the beginning, much mystified. The dining-room was quite a luxurious apartment, so was the "saint's" study--a den with a soft Eastern carpet, a big writing-table, a high porcelain stove of chocolate and white, and silk-upholstered settees. From this den a door opened into the "holy" man's sleeping-room, an apartment of spartan plainness save for its big stove, a replica of the one in the study. The household, I found, consisted of one other person, an old Siberian peasant woman of about sixty, named Anna, who came from Pokrovsky, the "saint's" native village. She acted as housekeeper and maid-of-all-work. That first morning spent with Rasputin was full of interest. He was a dirty, uncouth, illiterate fellow who repelled me. His hands were hard, his fingers knotty, his face was of a distinctly criminal type, and yet in my bewilderment I remembered that General Kouropatkine had declared him to be sent by the Almighty as the Protector of Russia. His conversation was coarse and overbearing, and interlarded by quotations from Holy Writ. He mentioned to me certain ladies in high society, and related, with a broad grin upon his saintly countenance, scandal after scandal till I stood aghast. Truly the "saint" was a most remarkable personality. From the first I had been compelled to admit that whatever the Russian public had said, there was a certain amount of basis for the gossip. His was the most weird and compelling personality that I had ever met. Even Stolypin had been impressed by him, though the Holy Synod had declared him to be a fraud. My work consisted of reading to him and replying to letters from hundreds of women who had become attracted by his peculiar distorted emotional religion, many of whom desired to enter the cult which he had established. As secretary it was also my duty to arrange for the weekly reunions of the "sister-disciples," held in a big bare upstairs room, in which hung a holy ikon and several sacred pictures, and in which the mysteries of his "religion" were practised.