erish
impatience."

At her performance he sat in the pit with his friend Kashkin, who says
he was terribly excited, and kept his opera-glasses fastened on her
always, though he must have been almost blinded by the tears that
streamed down his cheeks. The two did not meet, however, for seven
years, and then unexpectedly. He called at Nikolai Rubinstein's office
in the Conservatory; he was told to wait in the anteroom. After a time,
a lady came out. "Tschaikovski leaped to his feet and turned white. The
woman gave a little cry of alarm, and confusedly fumbled for the door.
Finding it at last, she fled without speaking."

In 1888 Tschaikovski went to Berlin. There Desiree was the idol of the
court and public. They met now as friends. He and Edvard Grieg called
at her house, and he wrote in his diary:

"This evening is counted among the most agreeable recollections of my
sojourn in Berlin. The personality and the art of this singer are as
irresistibly bewitching as ever."

_Requiescat in pace_! She had taught him the pangs of disprised love,
but she had escaped misery, and she seems to have lived happily ever
afterward with a husband who won eminence equal to hers as a singer. As
for Tschaikovski, he had already revenged himself in kind--in worse
kind--upon the sex, which had really attracted him only once.

In the year 1875 Tschaikovski's nerves had gone to pieces from overwork
and his mode of life. For months he was not allowed to write down a
note. And now, I think some one must have prescribed marriage as a cure
for his ills. There followed that strange affair which was a riddle as
late as the time Miss Newmarch's biography appeared in 1900; a solution
was then hoped from a sealed document left by Kashkin, and not to be
opened till the year 1927. Tschaikovski himself had looked over his own
diary, and had been so terrified at what he read that he destroyed a
great portion of it before his death in 1893. In 1902, however, his
brother Modeste began the publication of a very elaborate and complete
biography, which partially clears the riddle. This is what we learn
from that:

In 1875 Tschaikovski was a wreck. In 1876 he suddenly wrote his
brother: "I have resolved to marry--the resolve is beyond recall;" and
again: "The result of my thought is the firm resolve to marry with
whomsoever it may be." His photograph at this time has a worn, hunted
look, and he has become addicted to cold baths, of which his new plan
was