" he said, "to
a palace in a gloomy city and to an artiste--a ballet-dancer--but at the
same time a great _musicienne_ and a good and beautiful woman, a woman
with red, splendid hair, like my niece. There she lived in a palace in
this city, away from the world with her two children; an Emperor was her
lover and her children's father; and they all four were happy as the day
was long. The children were a boy and a girl, and presently they began
to grow up, and the boy began to think about life and to reason things
out with himself. He had, perhaps, inherited this faculty from his
grandfather, on his mother's side, who was a celebrated poet and
philosopher and a Spanish Jew. So his mother, the beautiful dancer, was
half Jewess, and, from her mother again, half Spanish noble; for this
philosopher had eloped with the daughter of a Spanish grandee, and she
was erased from the roll. I go back this far not to weary you, but that
you may understand what forces in race had to do with the boy's
character. The daughter again of this pair became an artist and a
dancer, and being a highly educated, as well as a superbly beautiful
woman--a woman with all Zara's charm and infinitely more chiseled
features--she won the devoted love of the Emperor of the country in
which they lived. I will not go into the moral aspect of the affair. A
great love recks not of moral aspects. Sufficient to say, they were
ideally happy while the beautiful dancer lived. She died when the boy
was about fifteen, to his great and abiding grief. His sister, who was a
year or two younger than he, was then all he had to love, because
political and social reasons in that country made it very difficult,
about this time, for him often to see his father, the Emperor.

"The boy was very carefully educated, and began early, as I have told
you, to think for himself and to dream. He dreamed of things which might
have been, had he been the heir and son of the Empress, instead of the
child of her who seemed to him so much the greater lady and queen, his
own mother, the dancer; and he came to see that dreams that are based
upon regrets are useless and only a factor in the degradation, not the
uplifting of a man. The boy grew to understand that from that sweet
mother, even though the world called her an immoral woman, he had
inherited something much more valuable to himself than the Imperial
crown--the faculty of perception and balance, physical and moral, to
which the family