Williams news., 1917-09-06

KeiSt were unknown to any
 outside the court circle at Pots
 dam. She was indeed a queer parsonage, "only less of a parsonage than his majesty" as Prince Bulow declared to me one day as we sat to- yether in my room in the Berlin Schloss.
 Frau Kleist was the court dancing mistress, whose fastidious judgment lad to be satisfied by any young debu- :ante or officer before they presumed 70 dance before royalty at. the state balls. Perhaps she was seventy. Her veal age never knew.
 Truly Frau Kleist, with her neat waist and thin, refined face, was a very striking figure at the Berlin court. The intricacies Of the minuet and gavotte, as well as those of the ld-world dances in which she delight ed, were taught by the old lady to Prince Joachim and Princess Victoria Luise, both of whom always went in deadly fear of her caustic tongue and overbearing manner.
 The emperor never permitted any dancing at court which was not up to high standard of excellence, and all who sought to dance were compelled to pass before the critical eye of the sharp-tongued old lady in her stiff silken gown.
 Whence she had come or who had been responsible for her appointment nobody knew. One thing was quite certain, that though at an age when usually rheumatism prevents agility yet she was an expert dancer.
 The old woman lived in considerable style in a fine house close to the Clientele bridge at Potsdam, beneath the Babelsberg, power to be reckoned with by all who desired to enter the court circle.
 Regarding her, many strange stories were af1oat. One was that she was an ex-dancer, the mother of the famous Mademoiselle "Clo-Clo" Durand, pre- miere danseuse of the Paris opera, and another was that she had been mis- tress of the ballet at. the Imperial opera in Petrograd in the days of the Emperor Alexander. But so great a mystery were her antecedents that mo- body knew anything for certain, save that, at the age of nearly seventy, she had access at any hour to the kaiser's private cabinet. I have often seen her whisper to his majesty strange secrets which she had picked up here and there-secrets that were often trans ferred to certain confidential quarters.
 Those at court who secured the be- nignant smiles of Frau Kleist knew that their future path in life would be full of sunshine, but woe betide those upon whom she knit her brows in dis approval. Frau Kleist kept her pretty house and her big Mercedes car upon the secret money payments she re- ceived from those who flor value" begged her favors. With many young officers the payment to Frau Kleist was to open the back door to the em- peror's favor.
 We in the Neues Palais (New dl- ace) knew it. But surely it did not concern us, for all of us looked askance at those who strove so strenuously and eagerly for "commands'' to court func- tiOns, and really we were secretly glad if the parvenus of both sexes were we'll bled hefore they were permitted by Frau Erna to make their obeisance be- fore royalty.
 The palace world at every European court is a narrow little world of it's own, unknown and unsuspected by the man in the street. There one sees the worst side of human nature without 1G side. The salary-grabber, the military adventurer, the pinchbeck diplomat the commercial parvenu, and the scien. list, together with their jewel-bedecked