“I suppose it’s foolish of me to go on like this. I’m indulging myself, I can talk to no one. So you ... just as I used to in those first days such years ago when I didn’t know a word of Russian, came and sat by the hour in your flat, talked bad French to your wife, and found all the sympathy I wanted in your kind fat face, even though we could only exchange a word or two in the worst German. How good you were to me then! How I must have bored you!... There’s no one here willing to be bored like that. To an Englishman time is money—none of that blissful ignoring of the rising and setting of sun, moon, and stars that for so many years I have enjoyed. ‘The morning and the evening were the first day....’ It was no Russian God who said that. I’ve found some old friends—Millet, Thackeray, you’ll remember—they were in Moscow two years ago. But with them it is ‘Dinner eight o’clock sharp, old man—got an engagement nine-thirty.’ So I’m lonely. I’d give the world to see your fat body in the doorway and hear your voice rise into that shrill Russian scream of pleasure at seeing me. You should sit down—You should have some tea although I’ve no Samovar to boil the water in, and I’d talk about Katherine, Katherine, Katherine—until all was blue. And you’d say ‘Harosho’ ‘Harosho’—and it would be six in the morning before we knew.... God help us all, I mustn’t talk about it. It all comes to this, in the end, as to whether a man can, by determination and resolve, of his own will, wipe out utterly the old life and become a new man. All those Russian years—Anna, Paul, Paul’s death, all the thought, the view, the vision of life, the philosophy that Russia gave me—those things have got to disappear.... They never existed. I’ve got again what, all those years, you all said that I wanted—the right to be once again an English citizen with everything, morals and all, cut and dried. I can say, like old Vladimir after his year in Canada, ‘I’d never seen so many clean people in my life.’ I’ve got what I wanted, and I mustn’t—I musn’t—look back. “I believe I can carry it all through if I can get Katherine—get her and keep her and separate her from the family. She’s got to belong to me and not to the Trenchards. Moscow—The Trenchards! Oh, Paul, there’s a Comedy there—and a tragedy too perhaps. I’m an ass, but I’m frightened. I think I’m doing the finest things and, when they’re done, they turn out the rottenest. Supposing I become a Trenchard myself? Think of that night when Paul died. Afterwards we went up to the Kremlin, you remember. How quiet it was and how entirely I seemed to have died with Paul, and then how quickly life was the same again. But at any rate Moscow cared for me and told me that it cared—London cares nothing ... not even for the Trenchards....