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letters of introduction for? And should I not see the social life of
Europe when the opportunity offered? So I left a card on the baroness.
She returned it in the course of a day or two, then wrote, asking me to
drink tea with her. I went. There were perhaps fifty people there. I
have not the faintest idea who they were or what they looked like.
Prestage--that was only one of his names, but it will do--asked
immediately to be introduced to me, and we talked in a corner for an
hour. Before we had talked for ten minutes I knew that the great gates
were swinging open. It is not possible for a woman to define one man's
fascination to another, and I hardly know myself why this man so
completely turned my head. He was not exactly good-looking, but he had
remarkable eyes and a singular tensity of manner, which made me almost
breathless at times. He was, moreover, brilliantly educated and
accomplished, and the most finished specimen of the man of the world I
had met. He was an American of inherited fortune who had spent the
greater part of his life in Europe, alternating between Paris and
London, although he knew the society of other cities well enough. His
contempt for the vulgarity of the huge modern fortunes, and his
admiration for Munich, were the first subjects to discover to us the
similarity of our tastes.

"We soon discovered others. I think he fell as deeply in love with me as
he was capable of doing. He was forty-one and had fairly exhausted his
capacity, for he had lived the life of pleasure only; but no doubt I was
something new in his experience, and penetrated the ashes like a strong
western breeze. I have seen him turn quite white when I suddenly
appeared at one of our trysts.

"Of course I lived in a pension. I had no private sitting-room, and he
positively refused to sit in the salon a second time. So we used to take
interminable walks about Munich, lingering in all the quaint old Gothic
corners, along the magnificent stretches of Renaissance; lunching on the
terraces of the restaurants under the shade of the green trees, or in
quaint little back gardens set in the angle of buildings as mediaeval as
Rothenburg; the people looking down at us from the narrow windows or the
little balconies. We spent hours in the Englischergarten, sitting on the
banks of the Isar; often took the train to the beautiful Isarthal and
spent the day in the woods; or sailed on one of the lakes with the
tumbled glittering peaks of th