orty.

"I beg your pardon," a massive lady dressed in an embroidered sack-like
garment, and wearing many strings of iridescent shells around her
throat, leaned forward from behind to say: "She is forty-six; I happen
to know; a friend of mine has met Madame Okraska's secretary. Forty-six;
but she keeps her beauty wonderfully; her figure is quite beautiful."

An element of personal excitement was evident in the people who sat in
these nearest chairs; it constituted a bond, though by no means a
friendly one. Emulation, the irrepressible desire to impart knowledge,
broke down normal barriers. The massive lady was slightly flushed and
her manner almost menacing. Her information was received with a vague,
half resentful murmur.

"She looks younger," she continued, while her listeners gave her an
unwilling yet alert attention. "It is extraordinary how she retains her
youth. But it tells, it tells, the tragic life; one sees it in her eyes
and lips."

The first girl now put forward with resolution her pawn of knowledge.

"It has been tragic, hasn't it. The dreadful man she was married to by
her relations when she was hardly more than a child, and the death of
her second husband. He was the Baron von Marwitz; her real name is von
Marwitz; Okraska is her maiden name. He was drowned in saving her life,
you know."

"The Baron von Marwitz was drowned no one knows how; he was found
drowned; she found his body. She went into a convent after his death."

"A convent? I was reading a life of her in a magazine the other day and
nothing was said about a convent."

The massive lady smiled tolerantly: "Nothing would be. She has a horror
of publicity. Yes, she is a mystic as well as an artist; she only
resigned the religious life because of what she felt to be her duty to
her adopted daughter. One sees the mystical side in her face and hears
it in her music."

Madame Okraska was one of those about whose footsteps legends rise, and
legend could add little to the romantic facts of her life;--the poverty
of her youth; her _debut_ as a child prodigy at Warsaw and the sudden
fame that had followed it; the coronets that had been laid at her feet;
her private tragedies, cosmopolitan friendships, her scholarship,
caprices and generosities. She had been the Egeria, smiling in mystery,
of half a dozen famous men. And it was as satisfactory to the devotee to
hear that she always wore white and drank coffee for her breakfast, as
that Rubinstein