“I was born at Bucharest in 1874,” he began slowly, “and, as I think you know, I lost my father a few months after my birth. The first person who stands out in my recollection at my mother’s side, was a German, my uncle, the Baron Heldenbruck. But as I lost him when I was twelve years old, I have only a hazy recollection of him. He was, it seems, a distinguished financier. As well as his own language, he taught me arithmetic, and that by such ingenious devices that I found it prodigiously amusing. He made me what he used laughingly to call his ‘cashier’--that is, he gave into my keeping a whole fortune of petty cash, and wherever we went together, it was I who had to do the paying. Whatever he bought--and he used to buy a great deal--he insisted on my adding up the bill in as short a time as it took me to pull the notes or coins out of my pocket. Sometimes he used to puzzle me with foreign money, so that there were questions of exchange; then of discount, of interest, of brokerage and finally even of speculation. With such a training, I very soon became fairly clever at doing multiplication--and even division--sums of several figures in my head.... Don’t be alarmed” (for he saw Julius’s eyebrows beginning to frown), “it gave me no taste either for money or reckoning. For instance, if you care to know, I never keep accounts. In reality this early education of mine was merely practical and matter-of-fact. It never touched anything vital in me.... Then Heldenbruck was wonderfully understanding about the proper hygiene for children; he persuaded my mother to let me go bare-headed and bare-footed in all weathers, and to keep me out of doors as much as possible; he used even to give me a cold dip himself every day, summer and winter. I enjoyed it immensely.... But you don’t care about these details.” “Yes, yes!” “Then he was called away on business to America and I never saw him again. “My mother’s salon in Bucharest was frequented by the most brilliant, and also, as far as I can judge from recollection, by the most mixed society; but her particular intimates at that time were my uncle, Prince Wladimir Bielkowski and Ardengo Baldi, whom for some reason I never called my uncle. They spent three or four years at Bucharest in the service of Russia (I was going to say Poland) and of Italy. I learnt from each of them his own language--Polish, that is, and Italian--as for Russian, I read and understand it pretty well, but I have never spoken it fluently. In the society of the kind of people who frequented my mother’s house and who made a great deal of me, not a day passed without my having occasion to practise three or four languages; and at the age of thirteen I could speak them all without any accent and with almost equal ease--and yet French preferably, because it was my father’s tongue and my mother had made a point of my learning it first.