No simple person will ever feel intimate or at home with his super-class indifference to material surroundings. A scrubwoman is just as uncomfortable in his presence as was the intrepid Mrs. Sheridan, who was able to rub such gay elbows with the other commissars. Mr. Tchicherin’s way of arching an eyebrow at life upsets the best brand of poise. Living alone in a barren room on the top floor of the Foreign Office, he is as far removed socially and physically from the lower as the upper crust. Perhaps only an aristocrat is able to attain this dizzy height of indifference to human contact with one’s fellows. And I can’t help feeling that there is something rather splendid about such complete isolation. Outside of politics, the telephone and the cable, all up-to-dateness offends him. He abhors new clothes, does not like to ride in automobiles, refuses to have modern office paraphernalia about him, does every little task for himself, like sharpening his own pencils and running all over the building on office-boy errands. This attitude produces the same effect as if he distrusted all his subordinates. His secretaries stand helpless and ill at ease while he searches for a lost telegram or answers the telephone. Last winter they told an amusing story of how Karakhan, who is Commissar of Eastern Affairs, lured Tchicherin into donning a new suit. Tchicherin’s one suit was literally in rags when the Turkish treaty and the Afghan treaty and the Persian treaty and all the other Oriental treaties were about to be signed. These affairs had to be arranged with more or less bourgeois pomp, since the Orientals are rather keen on ceremony. So Mr. Karakhan, taking a long chance, went ahead and ordered a new suit for Mr. Tchicherin from a Soviet tailor, then one morning while Tchicherin slept, he changed the suits. In a few minutes he came rushing back again and exclaimed with emotion, “There’s a new note from Lord Curzon!” Tchicherin was up in one bound and struggling into the new trousers. Whatever he thought privately of Mr. Karakhan’s presumption, they continued in an apparently pleasant relationship. In appearance Mr. Tchicherin is tall, with the bent shoulders of the man who stoops to go through doors. His eyes, not through any evasiveness, but because of an extreme shyness, continually seek other places than the face of his interviewer. Yet when one meets his quick, occasional glance, one is startled by the intelligence and gentleness of his expression.