“Don’t you love your country?” I asked.

“This isn’t our country,” she answered.  “It just belongs to the Empress and Protopopoff.”

“Supposing it became your country and the Emperor went?”

“Oh, then it would belong to a million different people, and in the end no one would have anything.  Can’t you see how they’d fight?"...  She burst out laughing:  “Boris and Nicholas and Uncle Alexei and all the others!”

Then she was suddenly serious.

“I know, Durdles, you consider that I’m so young and frivolous that I don’t think of anything serious.  But I can see things like any one else.  Can’t you see that we’re all so disappointed with ourselves that nothing matters?  We thought the war was going to be so fine—­but now it’s just like the Japanese one, all robbery and lies—­and we can’t do anything to stop it.”

“Perhaps some day some one will,” I said.

“Oh yes!” she answered scornfully, “men like Boris.”

After that she refused to be grave for a moment, danced about the room, singing, and finally vanished, a whirlwind of blue silk.

* * * * *

A week later I was out in the world again.  That curious sense of excitement that had first come to me during the early days of my illness burnt now more fiercely than ever.  I cannot say what it was exactly that I thought was going to happen.  I have often looked back, as many other people must have done, to those days in February and wondered whether I foresaw anything of what was to come, and what were the things that might have seemed to me significant if I had noticed them.  And here I am deliberately speaking of both public and private affairs.  I cannot quite frankly dissever the two.  At the Front, a year and a half before, I had discovered how intermingled the souls of individuals and the souls of countries were, and how permanent private history seemed to me and how transient public events; but whether that was true or no before, it was now most certain that it was the story of certain individuals that I was to record,—­the history that was being made behind them could at its best be only a background.

I seemed to step into a city ablaze with a sinister glory.  If that appears melodramatic I can only say that the dazzling winter weather of those weeks was melodramatic.  Never before had I seen the huge buildings tower so high, never before felt the shadows so vast, the squares and streets so limitless in their capacity for swallowing light and colour.  The sky was a bitter changeless blue; the buildings black; the snow and ice, glittering with purple and gold, swept by vast swinging shadows as though huge doors opened and shut in heaven, or monstrous birds hovered, their wings spread, motionless in the limitless space.

And all this had, as ever, nothing to do with human life.  The little courtyards with their woodstacks and their coloured houses, carts and the cobbled squares and the little stumpy trees that bordered the canals and the little wooden huts beside the bridges with their candles and fruit—­these were human and friendly and good, but they had their precarious condition like the rest of us.