“All married people are miserable. I know, because I’ve watched them. Mamma and Papa would give a million dollars—well, maybe not that much but certainly a couple of hundred thousand, if they could get loose without having to go through all the fuss in the courts, and the horrid things the newspapers would publish, and their pictures and all.” “But we won’t have to do that, dear.” “How do you know we mightn’t? If we got married, you’d think you had a right to me, and then you wouldn’t do what I say any more, and I wouldn’t be happy. Oh, let’s do our own way, and not what other people try to make us. All my life other people have been making me do things, and I’ve been fighting them—even you, Bunny-bear.” She had a score of such appellatives for him, because, as you can understand, his name was adapted to petting-party uses; they were dancing a contrivance known as the Bunny-hug, and he heard a lot about that. You went about in this prosperous and fashionable society, and on the surface everything was decorous and proper, fitting the marital formulas laid down in the laws and preached in the churches. But when you got under the surface—anywhere, high or low—what you found was that human beings, finding themselves unhappy, had come to private understandings. Husbands and wives set one another free, they made exchanges of partners, they brought friends into their homes, who were in reality substitute husbands or wives; there were companions and secretaries and governesses and cousins who played such roles—and when the children found it out, they were in position to put pressure on their parents, a kind of informal family blackmail, good for motor-cars and fur-coats and strings of pearls, and most precious of all, the right to have your own way. VIII Early in the year, while America was getting into the war, the people of Russia had overthrown their Tsar and set up a republic. That had pleased most people in America; it was much pleasanter to be allied with a republic. But now, in the fall, came a terrifying event; there was another revolution, this time not made by respectable scholars and business men, but by wild-eyed fanatics called “Bolshevikis,” who proceeded to confiscate property and smash things up. At once it became apparent what a calamity this was going to mean for the allies; Russia was going to desert them, and the mass of the Germans on the East would be set free to be hurled against the half-exhausted Western front. Already the Russian armies were going to pieces, the soldiers were deserting wholesale and swarming back to the cities or to their villages; at the same time the leaders of the new government were starting a world-wide propaganda attacking the allies and their war-aims.