She accompanied him as far as the garden, her conventional garden with ranks of perfect daffodils and tulips. There was a waiting limousine in the street, which she pretended not to notice, just as she pretended not to notice how he squeezed her hand when offering his calling card. "Just in case you should ever change your mind."

And that was the whole of her aborted recruitment on a Friday afternoon in Holland, late February of 1915. After Cramer's departure she returned to her home—rented from another local merchant, paid for by the Baron Edouard van der Capellen, half furnished by an earlier lover she had all but forgotten—and slept. Toward nightfall, a particularly blue twilight, she moved back to the garden with a cocktail and a copy of The Brothers Karamazov. Cramer's tastefully embossed calling card would mark the unread portion.

She would always be remembered here, often seen walking by the outer canals or sipping morning coffee on a terrace. Children would catch a glimpses of her watching from the edge of playgrounds, and of course they knew her in the shops. With the newspaper articles and the promotion of a Mata Hari biscuit in a decorative tin, it seemed that everyone had heard of her. There had even been a few who had seen her dance.

"The Hague is my purgatory," she would write to Gray. "They tolerate me here but I do not think they accept me." She also wrote that the women were the worst of it, but that was to be expected, given what had been printed in the newspapers. Still, there were pleasant afternoons in the Mauritshuis and the smaller museums where the students tended to congregate. Socially her life revolved around the baron, but since he was not a particularly demanding lover, many of her evenings were spent alone.

She read a lot at night, reviving old passions with a battered translation of the Upanishads and tales from the Pandava cycle. She also attended to her correspondence, including references to a possible performance in the spring. The piano offered some solace on otherwise too-quiet evenings, and occasionally she danced to selections of Mozart on the gramophone. On the whole, though, it seemed that memories sustained her through these days—memories, and a photograph of her daughter, Jeanne-Louise.

She wrote more than a dozen letters before receiving a reply from the child's father, Rudolph John MacLeod. Although his note was terse and apparently written with possible litigation in mind, he did agree that she should at least be allowed to see the girl ... if only for an afternoon. He also enclosed another photograph: Jeanne-Louise at about fifteen, along the seashore in a white dress; his own face in the background, stirring still more memories of the East.