* * * * *

Petrograd! the stage of romance, and the subject of dazzling pictures, is one of the most commonplace towns I have ever been in.  It has its one big street—­the Nevski Prospect—­where people walk and shop as they do in Oxford Street, and it has a few cathedrals and churches, which are not very wonderful.  The roadways are a mass of slush and are seldom swept; and there are tramways, always crowded and hot, and many rickety little victorias with damp cushions, in which one goes everywhere.  Even in the evening we go out in these; and the colds in the head which follow are chronic.

The English colony seems to me as provincial as the rest of Petrograd.  The town and its people disappoint me greatly.  The Hotel Astoria is a would-be fashionable place, and there is a queer crowd of people listening to the band and eating, as surely only in Russia they can eat.  It is all wrong in war-time, and I hate being one of the people here.

N.B.—­Write “Miss Wilbraham” as soon as possible, and write it in gusts.  Call one chapter “The Diners,” and try to convey the awful solemnity of meals—­the grave young men with their goblets of brandy, in which they slowly rotate ice, the waiter who hands the bowl where the ice is thrown when the brandy is cool enough, and then the final gulp, with a nose inside the large goblet.  Shade of Heliogabalus!  If the human tummy must indeed be distended four times in twenty-four hours, need it be done so solemnly, and with such a pig-like love of the trough?  If they would even eat what there is with joy one wouldn’t mind, but the talk about food, the once-enjoyed food, the favourite food, is really too tiresome.  “Where to dine” becomes a sort of test of true worth.  Grave young men give the names of four or five favoured places in London.  Others, hailed and acknowledged as really good judges, name half-a-dozen more in Paris where they “do you well.”  The real toff knows that Russia is the place to dine.  We earnestly discuss blue-point oysters and caviare, which, if you “know the man,” you can get sent fresh on the Vienna Express from Moscow.

[Page Heading:  BERNARD SHAW]

I once asked Bernard Shaw to dinner, and he replied on a postcard:  “Never!  I decline to sit in a hot room and eat dead animals, even with you to amuse me!”

I always seem to be sitting in hot rooms and eating dead animals, and then paying amazing high prices for them.

4 November.—­I dined with the ——­s the other night.  Either the hot rooms, or the fact that I am anaemic at present, causes me to be so sleepy in the evenings that I dislike dining out.  I sway with sleep even when people are talking to me.  It was a middle-class little party, such as I often enjoy.  One’s friends would fain only have one see a few fine blooms, but I love common flowers.

We have been to see “Peter’s little house.”  There was a tiny shrine, crowded with people in wraps and shawls, who crossed themselves ceaselessly, to the danger of their neighbours’ faces, for so fervid were their gesticulations that their hands flew in every direction!  They shoved with their elbows to get near the wax candles that dripped before the pictures of the black-faced Virgin and Child, who were “allowing” soldiers to be painfully slaughtered by the million.