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6 voices; In the midst of their orgies they gave no thought to the morrow, to the necessity of pulling themselves together and taking measures of protection against the coming storm.

For the coroneted ladies and gentlemen with their friends of the plutocracy and higher bureaucracy were engaged in shadowy drawing-rooms and perfumed boudoirs, "searching" the secrets of spiritism, occultism, buddhism, or mysticism. A multitude of doubtful personalities flitted phantomlike through these cushioned recesses as media, occult practitioners, brahmins, yogas, epileptics, hysteromaniacs, hallucinating visionaries, prophets; some were on the list of the German secret service, or agents of the police, the "Okhrana" or had "letters of introduction" to Rasputin.

Thus Spake Zarathustra was their favourite book. Nietzsche's bombastic, cynically immoral and frenzied phrases were always on their lips, and it seemed as though this Slav renegade had written to the order of the Prussian King a book full of moral poison, which could have its full effect only on a Muscovite. This seemed a moral poison gas invented especially for the benefit of the Russians, considerably in advance of the material products discovered by Dr. Luther and other Teutonic chemists.

The "ivory-white bones" of Russian aristocracy, kept alive by the "blue blood," insensitive to the change in the political atmosphere, were dancing their last waltz upon the edge of the gaping grave.