I strayed into various cafés in strange towns this summer and ordered my coffee and settled down to write parts of a long book on religion and life with which I was preoccupied all these months in Russia. I was generally intent to sit down and write out some idea which had occurred to me whilst I had been walking. One evening I found myself in a typical den--the long alley of a café with women on each side, painted, powdered, striking, their legs crossed or spread about the table legs, cigarettes in their hands, half-finished glasses of coffee in front of them. Down the alley came young men with flickering eyes and lips, now and then a leer, a sickly smile, a cynical or satirical grin. “This is the world,” think the young men, “this is the gay wicked world where what should never be sold can be bought.” But they are wrong--it is only a wee wicked corner. The great wide world is sweeter, healthier. XIII OLD FRIENDS I MET Alexander Alexandrovitch Beekof, the hunter of Archangel at Moscow. He had purchased three fine pictures by our friend Pereplotchikof, and they stood in his room in the Gostinny Dvor in wooden packing cases. Alexander Alexandrovitch stood me a lunch at Martianitch’s in the Red Square on a meatless day--a merchant’s restaurant where you may see many antique Russian types of merchants wearing knee boots and blouses and longish hair. We had a nice dish of fish-pie (_rastegai_) with our soup, and though no wine was available, the bill, as I saw, for the two of us was twenty roubles, and three roubles more went for the tip. In that way war prosperity expressed itself. My friend had to spend many days in Moscow collecting boots in small parcels. As the Government allows no packing-cases with goods to be taken by train from Moscow to Archangel (I imagine fine art is exempted from this regulation), Alexander Alexandrovitch Beekof had to buy some twenty portmanteaus to take his purchases of boots back to his native city. Pereplotchikof the painter is not very well. Heart weakness deprived him of the use of his legs this summer. He was confined to his bed and felt very wretched. I spent many mornings and evenings sitting and talking to him. The doctors say that vegetarianism has been too much for his constitution. One evening I brought him a quantity of rich honey I had come across in a little shop in Moscow. He was delighted as a child, and honey he said was ideal food for him. In exchange for this gift he gave me an old cross which he had once picked up on a market stall.