rsonality is concerned, this applied likewise to
Nelka. As I said before, I saw her for the first time when I was but
seven years old. The impression I got then never left me throughout
my life and only grew and developed with time and age.

We were married for 45 years and my love and devotion to her date
back from that encounter at seven. In other words a span of 60
years--a lifetime. A lifetime during which everything was centered
around this one person.

I think one can say that she had been both very happy and very
unhappy in her life, at least this was the balance of her feelings
during the first half of her life. During that period she experienced
great happiness in her relationship with her mother and with other
members of her family, in the devotion and loyalty she had to them.
She also experienced happiness in her endeavors in her school work,
in her interests in life and for life. The happiness she may have
derived from the realization of things well done and accomplished.

But also there was great, overwhelming unhappiness and sorrow,
because of the unusually hard way in which she accepted the loss of
those who were close to her. Few probably felt such losses as acutely
as she did and this caused pain and anguish. Then there also was
unhappiness in the contradiction and the division of feelings,
between two countries, two backgrounds, two ideologies, two
attachments. This constant division brought with it many heartaches,
many disappointments.

And then the second half of her life was the one she passed with
me. I can only hope that I may have given her at least a measure
of the happiness which she so much deserved. Again there were
disappointments, frustrations and heartaches as there are in every
life and existence. But gradually, with age she seemed to acquire a
greater calm in her feelings, she seemed to mellow in her intensity,
she seemed to find greater reconciliation within her own beliefs and
thoughts and find a greater calm of the soul and a greater
satisfaction in her beliefs than she had before that.

She always felt that the turning point in her life, as well as in
mine, started from the time we were in Constantinople and when we saw
a distant aunt of mine, Princess Gorchakoff.

She was a student of Theosophy and also seemed to have the calm and
serenity which comes from the study of that philosophy. Undoubtedly
she had a good deal of influence on Nelka and started us on a new way
of thin