An idea occurred to me; I put it to Rosine and she accepted it at once.

It was agreed that she would come with her friend Marguerite to my place at five o'clock, and that they would bring their dancing clothes with them. And I wrote the address down for her.

•

We return now to Olga, to whom Gibran, before I left him, had charged me to give his greetings... She was a Russian girl of his acquaintance who had come to Paris to pursue her higher studies in elocution and music. She was from the city of "Tomsk," fifteen days from Paris by train.

It happened that spring of 1910 that the Seine overflowed and the waters flooded the low-lying quarters, among them the house where Olga used to practice at the piano. She asked her friend Gibran to let her move the piano to his place, but the wooden staircase and the entrance were too narrow to let the piano through, so she sent the piano to my place, whose door was wide and gave onto the street. So Olga would come in the afternoons to practice her playing while I was at my work in the Academy...

And every now and then Olga would invite us — Gibran and me — to hear whatever we pleased of the melodies of Beethoven and Tchaikovsky... And the Russian "samovar" was always brimming with boiling water for the tea!

Forty-six years have passed since those days, and still among the loveliest of my Parisian memories are those sweet hours which fortune and the gods allowed us to live!.. I would sit with Gibran on a soft seat, sipping tea in a warm half-darkness, while Olga sat at the piano under the pale light, a gray shawl with brocaded borders hanging from her shoulders, fluttering like butterflies with the trembling of the melodies beneath her graceful fingertips...

And to those melodies Rosine danced with Marguerite, their marble bodies swaying like the columns of the Acropolis — now in ancient Greek robes, now in a sheer, coquettish drape that lent the dancing, pulsing beauty a sacred cast, before which my friend Gibran and I would sink into contemplation and reverence... and rapture!

Do you still wonder, my friend, why my eyes fill with tears?