After lunch when the women left the dining room some one hazarded a remark to the effect that the big rooms were pleasant with nobody in them. Our hostess said that was not an idea with which she was in sympathy, that she thought a big house should be full of people and as many enjoy it as possible, “whatever I have I want to share,” she said, and then turning to me, “Please tell that to the Bolsheviks--” I asked her why I should convey any such message,--she evidently mistook me for a messenger of the gods. Then suddenly, conversation drifted onto me and my plans. I was asked if when I returned I was going to live in Ireland, hadn’t my father got a place there? I answered that I lived where there was work, and, therefore, I might remain where I was, or go to Russia. Mrs. Vanderbilt looked rather surprised, and asked whether Russia paid better than any other country. That I did not know, but certain it is that any country pays more than England! This subject of payment seemed suddenly to excite her--, in a tremulously querulous voice, whilst the other women sat silently, I stood up in front of the fireplace and was cross-questioned, and nagged as to that payment. Who had paid me? Had Lenin and Trotzky paid me? What did I call government money? Whose money was it and where did it come from? I said I did not know, indeed I felt a great longing to be able to explain as she seemed so keen--but how could I tell where the money came from for which I had to give a receipt to the “All Russian Central Executive Committee of Soviets ...” for a cheque signed Litvinoff, (whose bust I had _not_ done) for payment through at Stockholm bank? Mrs. Vanderbilt thought it was dreadful, and said that I upset her very much. She said that Mr. Wilson’s government did not and could not do things like that! It occurred to me that probably there is very little similarity between the methods of Mr. Wilson’s government and those of the Russian Soviet, but who can prove that the Wilson form of government is right anyway? Altogether it was rather unpleasant, and I left as soon as I could, and wondering, as I walked home, why she had asked me to her house. I fear I must have irritated her from the start, because when she asked me to lunch there was no address on her card, and no telephone number in the book; so when I answered I addressed it as best I could to: Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt, New York, adding a little message: “Please, postman, deliver this somewhere in Fifth Avenue.” FEBRUARY 14, 1921. _William Penn Hotel, Pittsburgh_