ge, and, after two years of
quarrels with his wife's relatives and doubtless with her, had forsworn
the other sex. Incidentally he had taught all day and gambled all
night; so the husband was not the only gainer by the separation.
Nikolai and Tschaikovski set up a menage together for a time.
Tschaikovski, however, had not learned that womankind was not his kind;
so he flirted a little with the beautiful niece of one Tarnovski, for
instance, and with an unknown at a masked ball. But he was chiefly
music-mad and undermined his health by his overwork.

Then in 1868, his father got after him to marry. As long before as
1859, when he was nineteen, he had suffered from an unrequited love.
Now at the age of twenty-eight he cared nothing for petticoats. He had
written his sister a year ago that he was tired of life, and marriage
did not tempt him; he was, said he, "too lazy to woo, too lazy to
support a family, too lazy to endure the responsibility of a wife and
children." But upon this ennui fell an electric spark--from the old
storage-batteries, woman's eyes.

There had come to the Moscow opera a Belgian singer, Desiree Artot, who
was then thirty-three years old, a woman whose pictures make her nearly
beautiful, and who is recorded as a queen of grace and a queen of
dramatic and lyric song. She was witty and magnetic, and Peter
Iljitsch, five years her junior, like another Chopin and another Mary's
lamb, followed her about.

One day he wrote: "She is a charmer; we are friends." Then _tempo
accelerate_; he copied music for her benefit performance; later he
apologised for not writing his brother--he was all monopolised by the
singer. So he went swirling into the current. He tried to keep away;
they met by accident; she reproached him; he promised to call; then his
inveterate timidity palsied him, till Anton Rubinstein had to drag him
to her rooms by force.

Eventually they became engaged. Just as in Weber's case, the composer
demanded that the singer give up her career for his, and she and her
mother objected. She did not want to be merely the wife of her husband;
nor he, merely the husband of his wife. He appealed to his father, who
wrote a nobly generous letter, pleading the woman's right to her own
career: a very gospel of artistic equality.

"You love her: she loves you: and that should settle it, if--Oh, this
wretched if! The beloved Desiree must be altogether noble, since my son
Peter has loved her. He has taste and