Nicholas Andrev met me at the Kremlin at 1 o’clock. Kameneff had placed a car at our disposal for the afternoon. We went to several galleries, beginning with the Kremlin. The palace of a Grand Duchess (opposite the big bell) has been converted into a working people’s club. It was quite clean and cared for, but only the Empire Swan furniture suggested it had ever been a private habitation. We went downstairs to a private chapel, painted in black and gold. This had been made into a modelling school, and there were some very good things being done from life. The Spirit of the Holy Ghost descending as a dove from above, and the golden rays of a carved sun made a strange background. My bourgeois prejudice was just for a moment shocked, until I remembered that in our own old fourteenth century chapel at home Papa typewrites on the altar step. It has been longer in disuse it is true, but still, one must be consistent. From there we drove in the car to the house of Ostrouckof, who showed me his room full of Ikons, one of which came out of St. Sofia. Some date back to the fifth and sixth centuries. They were beautiful in design and colour, and most interesting when he explained them to me. Downstairs he had a modern motley collection. He showed us a Mattisse given to him by Mattisse himself; it was a curious contrast after Ikons. We drifted into some art schools, where soldiers and sailors were working from life models, and the work they were doing was extremely good. One of these schools was in the large house of a rich merchant. The Soviet Government are pretty shrewd in the selection of houses for various purposes. Although some of the big houses are [Illustration: THE CHURCH OF SAINT BASIL AND THE RED SQUARE. _p. 95._] often given over for clubs or workplaces, only a really vulgar, over-decorated house in impossibly bad taste is used for rough or dirty work. The exhibitions of proletarian art are very interesting, and deeply imbued with the modern movement. There are crude drawings that show an appreciation of form, and there is sculpture in wood that is often very effective, and may lead to something good. One of these exhibitions was in an exquisite house of beautiful architecture that stood back from the street, in a garden that had run to seed. The house had once belonged to the Princess Dolgorouki, but it had passed into the hands of a Countess somebody, who had died. The daughter _héritière_ had been turned out, but it was said that she was still living in the basement. The ground floor consisted of a series of small, beautifully proportioned rooms, with painted ceilings and carved doors. One was a Chinese room and all were in exquisite taste. There were some lovely Empire bronzes and old Dorée, and other objects of art.