"Few women are more superstitious than the Empress Dowager. Her whole
life was influenced by her belief in fate, charms, good and evil
spirits, gods and demons.

"When it was first proposed that she have her portrait painted for the
St. Louis Exposition, she was dumfounded. After a long conversation,
however, in which Mrs. Conger explained that portraits of many of the
rulers of Europe would be there, including a portrait of Queen
Victoria, and that such a painting would in a way counteract the false
pictures of her that had gone abroad, she said that she would consult
with Prince Ching about the matter. This looked very much as though it
had been tabled. Not long thereafter, however, she sent word to Mrs.
Conger, asking that Miss Carl be invited to come to Peking and paint
her portrait.

"We all know how this portrait had to be begun on an auspicious day;
how a railroad had to be built to the Foreign Office rather than have
the portrait carried out on men's shoulders, as though she were dead;
how she celebrated her seventieth birthday when she was sixty-nine, to
defeat the gods and prevent their bringing such a calamity during the
celebration as had occurred when she was sixty, when the Japanese war
disturbed her festivities. On her clothes she wore the ideographs for
'Long Life and 'Happiness,' and most of the presents she gave were
emblematic of some good fortune. Her palace was decorated with great
plates of apples, which by a play on words mean 'Peace,' and with
plates of peaches, which mean 'Longevity.' On her person she wore
charms, one of which she took from her neck and placed on the neck of
Mrs. Conger when she was about to leave China, saying that she hoped it
might protect her during her journey across the ocean, as it had
protected herself during her wanderings in 1900, and she would not
allow any one to appear in her presence who had any semblance of
mourning about her clothing.

"It is a well-known fact that no Manchu woman ever binds her feet, and
the Empress Dowager was as much opposed to foot-binding as any other
living woman. Nevertheless, she would not allow a subject to presume to
suggest to her ways in which she should interfere in the social customs
of the Chinese, as one of her subjects did. This lady was the wife of a
Chinese minister to a foreign country, and had adopted both for herself
and her daughters the most ultra style of European dress. She one day
said to Her Majesty, 'The bound fee