A pro-German, and the mistress of Rasputin!! Must this then, be the epitaph of the friend whom I knew, and the Empress to whom I owed the respect of a subject? I am not blind to the knowledge that any vehement defence may do her memory still more harm, but, nevertheless, I am impelled to write of her as she existed in her home, and in our hearts. I have read and heard almost all that has been laid to her charge; I am no skilled writer, I know little or nothing of politics, but I can lay claim to some knowledge of my own sex. During the awful days of the Revolution, the Empress spoke to me as woman to woman. Her mind constantly dwelt on the days of her girlhood, her life with her grandmother, and the unhappiness of her childhood at Hesse Darmstadt. The Emperor was the love of her life. She told me herself that he was her first love, but, the greater her love, the greater her fear lest she would prove unworthy. She gave herself to Russia when she married, and she accepted Russia as a sacred trust; but she and the Emperor were always more husband and wife than Emperor and Empress--they lived the intimate life of happily married people, they liked simplicity, they shrank from publicity, and this love of retirement was the source of many of the evil reports which assailed the Imperial Family. The Empress told me that when she cried at the marriage of her brother her tears were said to be tears of jealous rage at seeing herself dispossessed of authority. “But, Lili, I was _not_ jealous. I cried when I thought of my mother; this was the first festival since her death. I seemed to see her everywhere.” She described the dull Palace, its strict regime, her father’s intermittent kindness, and how much she had looked forward to her visits to Windsor. I think that the intimacy with her grandmother unconsciously brought out the Early Victorian strain in the Empress’s character. She undoubtedly possessed this strain, as in many ways she was a typical Victorian; she shared her grandmother’s love of law and order, her faithful adherence to family duty, her dislike of modernity, and she also possessed the “homeliness” of the Coburgs, which annoyed Society so much. The Russian aristocracy could not understand why on all the earth their Empress knitted scarves and shawls as presents for her friends, or gave them dress-lengths. Their conception of an Imperial gift was totally different, and they were oblivious of the love which had been crocheted into the despised scarf or the useful shawl--but the Empress, with her Victorian ideas as to the value of friendship, would not, or could not, see that she was a failure in this sense. The Empress was in many ways as thrifty as her grandmother, but she did not share the miserly proclivities of her uncle, the late Duke of Saxe-Coburg. Her father was not a wealthy man, in fact life at Darmstadt was occasionally a question of ways and means. The Empress had been taught to be careful. She _was_ careful.