“I’m a little afraid,” he answered. “What will you say if I don’t like it?” She seemed really for an instant to be afraid. “But, of course, of course, you will.” “Everyone doesn’t. Someone told me the other day that either it was desolate enough to depress you for a lifetime or stuffy like a hot-house, and that the towns were the ugliest in the United Kingdom.” Katherine sighed and then smiled. “I expect they’d think Manchester the loveliest place on earth,” she said. Then, looking at him very intently, she asked him: “Do you regret Russia—the size and the space and the strangeness? I daresay you do. Do you know, Phil, I’m rather jealous of Russia, of all the things you did before I knew you, I wonder whether I’d have liked you if I’d met you then, whether you’d have liked me. I expect you were very different. Tell me about it. I’m always asking you about Moscow, and you’re so mysterious—yes, I believe I’m jealous.” Philip looked away from her, out of the window, at the fields with their neat hedges, the gentle hills faintly purple, villages tucked into nests of trees, cows grazing, horses mildly alert at the passing train. For a moment he was conscious of irritation at the tidy cosiness of it all. Then he spoke, dreamily, as though he were talking in his sleep: “No. That’s all behind me. I shall never go back there again. I don’t think of it often, but sometimes I fancy I’m there. Sounds will bring it back, and I dream sometimes.... One gets so used to it that it’s hard now to say what one did feel about it. I had a little flat in a part of the town called the Arbat. Out of my window I could see a church with sky-blue domes covered with silver stars, there was a shop with food, sausages and all kinds of dried fish, and great barrels of red caviare and mountains of cheese. The church had a cherry-coloured wall, with a glittering Ikon at the gate and a little lamp burning in front of it. There were always some cabs at the end of my street, with the cabmen in their fat, bunched-up clothes sleeping very often, their heads hanging from the shafts. Lines of carts from the country would pass down the street with great hoops of coloured wood over the horses’ necks and wild-looking peasants in charge of them. They didn’t seem wild to me then—they were quite ordinary. Always just before six the bells at the church would ring, one slow, deep note and a little funny noisy jangle as well—one beautiful and unearthly; the other like a talkative woman, all human.... In the autumn there’d be weeks of rain and the mud would rise and rise, and the carts and cabs go splashing through great streams of water. When the snow came there’d be fine days and the town on fire, all sparkling and quivering, and every ugly thing in the place would be beautiful. There’d be many days too when the sky would fall lower and lower and the town be like grey blotting-paper and the most beautiful things hideous. Opposite my window there was a half-built house that had