my portrayal of the manner of a Japanese,
after they have seen my performance, in company with real Japanese.
This, considering my height, has always pleased me immensely. If you can
feel in a vast audience that even one person knows, understands and
appreciates the study you have put upon a role to make it true to life,
you are rewarded for your pains.

CHAPTER XIX

RUSSIANS, COMMON AND PREFERRED

The Grand Duke was always very good to me. He liked talking English with
my sister and me, and always referred to the Germans as "they," never as
"we." He asked me to the palace one evening to dinner. We dined in a
room hung with portraits of his beautiful sisters. They looked like fair
angels, the portraits having been painted when both the Czarina of
Russia and her sisters were quite young girls. We were told by friends
that the Czarina used to be perfectly exquisite as a young woman,
usually gowned in pale grey with a huge bunch of violets. After dinner
we went up to the Grand Duke's own private music room where guests were
seldom invited. The piano was set high, on a hollow inlaid sounding box,
an idea of His Royal Highness's which improved the tone immensely.
Behind it on the wall was a life size painting of a Buddha-like female
figure. This was in creamy brown and gold, inlaid with chrysophrases,
and lit mysteriously at will from either side, on top, or bottom. The
lighting he preferred, and which he told me he used when he played for
hours--he knew not what--was provided by four rings of glass, suspended
horizontally from the ceiling, through which a radiant sapphire light
poured. I don't know how it was managed, but it was very beautiful. In
one corner of the room was a grotto, also blue lit with a charming,
quiet, nude figure, and a fountain that drip-dripped as you listened.

I sat down at the piano and played and sang all the negro melodies my
father had collected in the Bahamas years before. I think the guests
were rather bewildered by the swift pattering English, but the Grand
Duke and his cousin, the Princess Victoria of Schleswig-Holstein were
charmed with them. Princess Victoria and her mother, Princess Christian,
King Edward's sister, were afterwards good enough to be patronesses at
my first recital in London.

The Grand Duke loved beautiful Oriental effects, and never seemed to me
to be in the least German. He came to a supper-dance once, given by a
Baronin O----, dressed as an oriental potentat