“About two months after I came home that year, one day when I was out driving with my daughter in a sledge the revolutionaries fired six shots at us from revolvers.  We were not hit, but one bullet went through the coachman’s cap.  Ever since then I have had nervous fits and my daughter has had St. Vitus’ dance.  We have to go to Moscow every year to be treated.  And it is so difficult.  I don’t know how to manage.  When I am at home I feel as if I ought to go, and when I am away I never have a moment’s peace, because I cannot help thinking the whole time that my husband is in danger.  A few weeks after they shot at us I met some of the revolutionary party at a meeting, and I asked them why they had shot at myself and my daughter.  I could have understood it if they had shot at my husband.  But why at us?  He said:  ’When the wood is cut down, the chips fly about.’[*] And now I don’t know what to think about it all.

     [*] A Russian proverb.

“Sometimes I think it is all a mistake, and I feel that the revolutionaries are posing and playing a part, and that so soon as they get the upper hand they will be as bad as what we have now; and then I say to myself, all the same they are acting in a cause, and it is a great cause, and they are working for liberty and for the people.  And, then, would the people be better off if they had their way?  The more I think of it the more puzzled I am.  Who is right?  Is my husband right?  Are they right?  Is it a great cause?  How can they be wrong if they are imprisoned and killed for what they believe?  Where is the truth, and what is truth?”

A LUNCHEON-PARTY

I

Mrs. Bergmann was a widow.  She was American by birth and marriage, and English by education and habits.  She was a fair, beautiful woman, with large eyes and a white complexion.  Her weak point was ambition, and ambition with her took the form of luncheon-parties.

It was one summer afternoon that she was seized with the great idea of her life.  It consisted in giving a luncheon-party which should be more original and amusing than any other which had ever been given in London.  The idea became a mania.  It left her no peace.  It possessed her like venom or like madness.  She could think of nothing else.  She racked her brains in imagining how it could be done.  But the more she was harassed by this aim the further off its realisation appeared to her to be.  At last it began to weigh upon her.  She lost her spirits and her appetite; her friends began to remark with anxiety on the change in her behaviour and in her looks.  She herself felt that the situation was intolerable, and that success or suicide lay before her.

One evening towards the end of June, as she was sitting in her lovely drawing-room in her house in Mayfair, in front of her tea-table, on which the tea stood untasted, brooding over the question which unceasingly tormented her, she cried out, half aloud:—­