'
_Dame!_ I think he would own himself mistaken now. Mr. Felix Leominster
himself is not a greater social success than the Baron Antonio Antonelli,
of the Legion of Honour. I am as sensitive as any one to the smallest spot
on my linen, and Duchesses rave about my charming manners.
For the rest my souvenirs are not very numerous. I lived in Germany until I
made my _debut_, and I never heard anything more of Ninette.
The history of my life is very much the history of my art: and that you
know. I have always been an art-concentrated man--self-concentrated, my
friend Felix Leominster tells me frankly--and since I was a boy nothing has
ever troubled the serene repose of my egoism.
It is strange considering the way people rant about the 'passionate
sympathy' of my playing, the 'enormous potentiality of suffering' revealed
in my music, how singularly free from passion and disturbance my life has
been.
I have never let myself be troubled by what is commonly called 'love.'
To be frank with you, I do not much believe in it. Of the two principal
elements of which it is composed, vanity and egoism, I have too little
of the former, too much of the latter, too much coldness withal in my
character to suffer from it.
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