An unhealthy spot this Kislovodsk, the air of its little streets heavy with the odour of decay and dirt. It is in a valley and there are glorious moors and hills about it. But one never sees any visitor on the hills. The visitors keep to the leafy promenades in the park, within hearing of the music of the bandstands and in reach of the café and the ice-cream bar. The women are mostly in white, but more coarse of feature than in most places in Russia--the faces of women on a low level of intelligence, of the sort who pride themselves on being “interesting” to men. They wear their diamonds in the afternoon. A lady was robbed of her diamonds in broad daylight in Essentuki, a neighbouring resort, and on being reproached for wearing diamonds in wartime, replied, “Where else should I show them except at the waters?” The people who have made fortunes out of the war are prominent at Kislovodsk, and the emptiness of their gay life is an unpleasant contrast to the realities of the time. Not the cultured of Russia, these, not the noble and the wise, not the people who really are the nation! Yet enter into conversation with one of these commercial parvenus and you find boundless vanity and self-importance. “We are the people who count in Russia,” they say. Go into a restaurant and your senses will be lacerated as you see them all around you eating with their knives. The books they are reading are Artsibashef, Fonvizin, Verbitskaya. Ask about the real artists of Russia and they raise their eyebrows or express contempt. They are nearest to the class in America that invented the word “high-brow” and for whom commercial talent must go on manufacturing huge quantities of loathsome “low-brow” literature, art, music and drama. Many people asked me about England, but I was obliged to say the spirit of England would not tolerate a Kislovodsk; we have nothing quite so shameless during the war. We have people who are profiting by death and destruction and calamity and sorrow, but public opinion does not allow these venal gains to be flaunted in this way. At Russian theatres, as indeed in English theatres at home, flippant and indecent farces, the theatres themselves going ahead of the people and leading downward. One thing we may generally surmise, comparing one side of the footlights with the other--the life of the people looking on is ten thousand times better than the life presented on the stage. The vulgar and cynical notions expressed by the actors and actresses are only regarded as curious or amusing or spicily outrageous by the people who have paid so much money for the doubtful privilege of listening.