I have finally decided to give in my resignation.  What is the use?  No work is being done.  We only talk.  The whole administration, the whole administrative machinery, stands still, evidently retrograding every day.

Many understand it.  Rodzianko is going away south; a man whom they think too old and too much of a reactionary.  He is quite depressed, I presume, but likes to look perfectly satisfied.  When I asked him whether the war looked to him as though it were to be continued, he gazed at me, and not after hesitation sighed, and said: 

“Yes, if the army will stand the effects of order number one.”

And then, fearing the next question coming, he assumed the air of a busy man and shook hands—­“as he had to go and see his relatives.”

Nearing the house I saw Kerensky in the Emperor’s car, proud, and smiling to left and right.  His Excellency, the Minister of Justice!

3.

Everybody is sure and proud that he is building up the new Russia.  Lawyers and doctors, engineers and priests, all run with busy faces,—­they think a statesman of today must run,—­everybody gives orders, counter-orders, nobody carries them out, nobody listens.  There are about 200,000 Napoleons in Petrograd today; as they multiply by section, this number will be enormous before long.  The situation, however, does not improve....

In the office there was quite a discussion of the probabilities, and I was listening to the younger people.  Criticism and “my own opinion” are the main sicknesses.  Perhaps the private initiative used to be so hardly oppressed, that it comes out at present in excess.

Why should lawyers be convinced, that their profession gives them the right, primo genio to be statesmen?  I should suggest an archeologist, or a man in charge of a lighthouse.

4.

We all went to the “Farce,” Maroossia and F., myself and Misha.  Afterwards we had supper.  At the next table to us were the M’s., Alexander Ivanitsky and the Baroness B. Since her return she certainly looks much better.  At first I did not see her, then before all she reprimanded me in her usual kind manner.  She had grown a little thinner and has more jewelry I should say, and is as fascinating as before.  When she speaks one can see that she thinks of far distant things.

“We all are busy these days,” she said, when I asked her whether she came here from England just for curiosity to see all of us under the Provisional Government.  “You did not change at all.”  Misha, who did not know B. before, did not like her very much,—­in fact, they all think she is suspicious.  Aren’t these youngsters peculiar?  Especially Misha who is so grouchy lately—­all seems dangerous to him.  I never think that a woman can be anything but pretty or hideous.  There is no middle, and no suspicion about them.  If a woman is, what they perhaps would call “suspicious”—­then there is a man’s influence behind her—­so find the man (and it is easy) and she is as plain as a card on the table.  Baroness B. is pretty.  And if she likes to talk like a Pythia,—­that’s her way of making people interested in her.