Yet, when the Russo-Japanese war broke out, she was quite ashamed, when she thought of the Tsar, that we had not gone to war also to help the “poor Russians,” “since,” she reminded us, “we’re allianced to them.” She felt this abstention to be not quite polite to Nicholas

II , who had always “said such nice things about us”; it was a corollary of the same code which would have prevented her from refusing a glass of brandy from Jupien, knowing that it would “upset” her digestion, and which brought it about that now, with my grandmother lying at death’s door, the same meanness of which she considered France guilty in remaining neutral with regard to Japan she would have had to admit in herself, had she not gone in person to make her apologies to this good electrician who had been put to so much trouble.