The why and wherefore of my privilege to write a true account of the
Princess Yasmini's early youth is a story in itself too long to tell here;
but it came about through no peculiar wisdom. I fell in a sort of way
in love with her, and that led to opportunity.

She never made any secret of the scorn with which she regards those
who singe wings at her flame. Rather she boasts of it with
limit-overreaching epithets. Her respect is reserved for those rare
men and women who can meet her in unfair fight and, if not defeat
her, then come close to it. She asks no concessions on account of
sex. Men's passions are but weapons forged for her necessity; and
as for genuine love-affairs, like Cleopatra, she had but two, and the
second ended in disaster to herself. This tale is of the first one that
succeeded, although fraught with discontent for certain others.

The second affair came close to whelming thrones, and I wrote of that
in another book with an understanding due, as I have said, to opportunity,
and with a measure of respect that pleased her.

She is habitually prompt and generous with her rewards, if far-seeing
in bestowal of them. So, during the days of her short political eclipse
that followed in a palace that had housed a hundred kings, I saw her
almost daily in a room--her holy of holies--where the gods of ancient
India were depicted in three primal colors working miracles all over
the walls and where, if governments had only known it, she was already
again devising plans to set the world on fire.

There, amid an atmosphere of Indian scents and cigarette smoke,
she talked and I made endless notes, while now and then, when she
was meditative, her maids sang to an accompaniment of rather