I had set up house — or rather, rooms in somebody else's house [in Bucharest] — in a modest kind of way, and engaged a native cook who, being a gipsy as well as a Moldavian, was musical to the core. Meticka (the Roumanian diminutive for Demetrius) could play the fiddle or ciombolán with excellent taste and spirit, and sing right tunefully with a soft light tenor voice that would have made the fortune of a French or German hero of operetta.