ever cross my path again. To-night I regret him, but then I am lonely for the moment--friendless, and this is a place where one needs friends. At 9 o’clock, not having eaten since 10 a.m., I went downstairs to round-up some food. There, to my surprise, I met Litvinoff, who had been in Moscow since the day before yesterday. Our pleasure at seeing each other again was mutual and spontaneous. He is coming to stay at our house, and will occupy the vacated room of Borodin. OCTOBER 16TH. Comrade Alexandre came to see me at 9 p.m., to tell me that he could not arrange with Trotsky for sittings. I gathered that Trotsky had been emphatic and brusque in his refusal, but after all, I have done Lenin, and he is the one who counts most. I can go back to England without the head of Trotsky, but I could not have gone without the head of Lenin. I _have_ accomplished what I came for, and so to hell with Trotsky! Alexandre said he could only stay ten minutes, but he left at midnight. He talked Communism the whole time. Now Borodin unfurled his Communist spirit to me slowly, because he knew me, and to what I belonged, and he realised that the thing hurled at me in a crude mass would stagger me. He led me up to it with great caution. Alexandre, on the other hand, with no understanding or sympathy, took all my inborn prejudices and just broke them, stamped on them, metaphorically spat on them, and gave me a big feed of unadulterated Communism. He is a fanatic, and left me breathless and wondering. All was well until we got to the children part: he said that his wife had to work, so their baby, who is six weeks old, has to go by day to the Crèche. “Are you satisfied with the care it gets at the Crèche?” I asked him. He shrugged his shoulders, said that collectively they could not receive the same attention as they would if they were cared for individually. He then volunteered the information that of course the baby was more liable to get ill and even die if it was in the Crèche, but that it was a chance, and after all his wife’s life was not going to be reduced to feeding, washing, and dressing a baby. That was no sort of existence, and so, what alternative was there except the Crèche? It was the cold, dispassionate way in which he said it that gave me the creeps. “What is your wife’s work?” I said. “Politics, same as mine,” he said. “Are you fond of your baby?” “Yes.” “Is your wife fond of it?” “Yes.” I thought to myself that she has not had to pray for a baby, and weep because the months went by. She has not had to wait, and wait--it is not infinitely precious to her, her baby. He then counter-questioned me: “What did you do with your children when you became a widow and had no home?” “My parents took them.” “And if you had had no parents who could take them? How could you have worked?”