sciousness and threatening to strangle it, and trampled them under the
heel of my will. It was by no means the least happy interval of my life,
for I was very healthy, I took a great deal of outdoor exercise, and
there was a sense of freedom I never had experienced before. Love is
slavery, and I was no longer a slave.

"After my husband's death, as I told you, I opened the Zattiany palace in
Vienna once more (my nephew and his wife preferred Paris, and I leased it
from them), expecting to follow the life I had mapped out, until I was
too old for interests of any sort. I had a brilliant salon and I was
something of a political power. Of course, I knew that the war was
coming long before hatreds and ambitions reached their climax, and
advised this man of whom I have spoken, Mathilde Loyos, and other
friends, to invest large sums of money in the United States. Judge Trent
arranged the trusteeship in each case----"

"Where is this man?"

"I do not know. He went down with the old regime, of course, and would
be a pauper but for these American investments and a small amount in
Switzerland. He has occupied no position in the new Government, although
he was a Liberal in politics. What he is doing I have no idea. I have
not seen him for years."

"Well--go on."

"It was only when I became aware of a growing mental lassitude, a
constant sense of effort in talking everlastingly on subjects that called
for constant alertness and often reorientation, that I was really aghast
and began to look toward the future not only with a sense of helplessness
but of intolerable weariness. I used to feel an inclination to turn my
head away with an actual physical gesture when concentration was
imperative. I thought that my condition was psychological, that I had
lived too much and too hard, that my memory was over-burdened and my
sense of the futility and meaninglessness of life too overwhelming. But
I know now that the condition was physical, the result of the
degeneration of certain cells.

"I spent the summer alone on my estate in Hungary, and when it was over I
determined to close the palace in Vienna and remain in the country. I
could not go back to that restless high-pitched life, with its ceaseless
gaiety on the one hand and its feverish politics and portentous rumblings
on the other. My tired mind rebelled. And the long strain had told on
my health.

"I lived an almost completely outdoor life, riding, walking, swimm