"Listen here!" she would say, grabbing my arm. "I want to tell you something. I'm going to see this thing--d'you know what I mean?--for what it'll do to me--you know--for its effect on my mind! I didn't say anything about it to anybody--they'd only laugh at me--d'you know what I mean? They don't think I've got any serious side to me. Now, I don't mind things--I mean blood--you know--they don't affect me, and I've read about nursing--I've prepared for this! Now, I don't know how to go about it, but it seems to me that a woman who can--you know--go right with 'em--jolly 'em along--might be just what they'd want--d'you know what I mean?" One Russian had said good-by to a friend at the dock, he to try to get through this way, the other by the Pacific and Trans-Siberian. The Englishman who shared my stateroom was an advertising man. "I've got contracts worth fifty thousand pounds," he said, "and I don't suppose they're worth the paper they're written on." There were several Belgians and a quartet of young Frenchmen who played cards every night and gravely drank bottle after bottle of champagne to the glory of France. Even the Balkans were with us, in the shape of a tall, soldier-like Bulgarian with a heavy mustache and the eyes of a kindly and highly intelligent hawk. He was going back home--"to fight?" "Yes, to fight." "With Servia?" asked some one politely, with the usual vague American notion of the Balkan states. The Bulgarian's eyes shone curiously. "You have a sense of humor!" he said. This man had done newspaper work in Russia and America, studied at Harvard, and he talked about our politics, theatres, universities, society generally. It was a pity, he said, and the result of the comparative lack of critical spirit in America that Mr. Roosevelt had been a hero so long. There were party papers mechanically printing their praise or blame--"and then, of course, the New York Evening Post and the Springfield Republican"--but no general intelligent criticism of ideas for a popular idol to meet and answer. "On the whole, he's a good influence--but in place of something better. It isn't good for a man to stand so long in the bright sunshine." That it was impossible for the Mexicans to work out their own salvation he doubted. "I think of Bulgaria--surely our inheritance of Turkish rule was almost as bad, and of how the nation has responded, and of the intensive culture we had at a time when we were only a name to most western Europeans." He was but one of those new potentialities which every whisper from the now cloud-wrapped Continent seemed to be opening --this tall, scholar-fighter from the comic-opera land where Mr. Shaw placed his chocolate soldiers.