Pride in Russia, and in Russia’s might and wealth and brilliant future, was one of Irene’s greatest joys. The Russian people seemed to her to be a race of chivalrous knights, ever ready to fight for truth and Christianity, and to defend the weak and the persecuted. When the Japanese War broke out, she asked herself, with the sincerest astonishment, how such pitiful monkeys ever could have declared war on such indomitable knights. She even pitied the Japanese for having fallen victims to such madness! Her despair and suffering at the news of our first failures is therefore easy to imagine. None of Irene’s near relations were at the war, but each of our losses, nevertheless, found its echo in her heart, like a personal misfortune. Overwhelmed with grief, she attached no importance either to the Russian revolution, or to the reforms that followed. Like all passionate idealists when their ideal is shattered, Irene rushed to the other extreme—that of a profound contempt for Russia. Everything became cold and indifferent to her in her homeland. She no longer believed in anybody; she trusted neither the masses nor the educated classes. They were all cowards, they were all narrow, lazy, and ignorant. She began to go abroad more frequently. There, in contrast, everything pleased her immensely. She admired the German peasants for their love of work, the Swiss for their orderliness, the French for their wit. In old days, after having passed three months abroad, she had always grown homesick, and on reaching the Russian frontier, had felt inclined to embrace the very railway porters for their good-humoured Slavonic faces! Now, she returned home with regret, found fault with Russian arrangements, and looked with disgust at the endless, monotonous fields, at the dull, slumbering type of life and nature that slipped placidly along outside the windows of the sleepy train. Her contempt for Russia was encouraged by the countless critical and scathing articles that appeared in the newspapers as a result of the newly granted freedom of the Press. According to these articles all Russia’s resources had been used up by drink and by robbery, and the whole country was in a state of ruin and primitive savagery. They did not attempt to explain why, all this being so, Russia had not, long ago, died of starvation and famine, why our government stock stood higher than before the war, and why Europe set as much value as ever on Russian opinion. But Irene, like most women, did not measure the rights and wrongs of the newspaper accusations. They were in tune with her pessimistic mood, and she no longer believed in Russia, just as she no longer believed in her own happiness.