“Never let us alone,” she answered. “We need you. All that you do now, do more. We need you much. Our dangers are from ourselves only. Our interior construction is very difficult. When the war is over, our hands will be quite free. But that is difficult too, for our soldiers are tired, and very, very dark. They do not understand the danger to Russia. The country is large, rich--very rich, but not enough civilize-ed,” she said. “We need aid--we need teachers. How to do it--that is the question.” We talked of Russian women. “They are very good, our women. But they are not active enough; they are not energetic,” she said. “Before it was always waiting--what will be permitted. We had no liberty to act by ourselves. Now, when we have liberty, we have not the experience. I can work because I fear nothing. I fear-ed nothing all my life. I have always worked. The initiative is a great thing. You have much of it, but the Russian women--the instinct and the moral forces are all right, but there is not the will to do.” Every big and little problem of Russia lay heavily on the grandmother’s heart; but she refused to permit her vision of the future to be blurred by the tragedies of the present. From the days of her childhood as the daughter of a wealthy land-owner, through solitary confinement in the dungeon of the Fortress of Peter and Paul, and dreary years of hard labor on the Siberian steppes, her life has always been touched with consciousness of the sorrow of others. “When I look back upon my past life, I can not remember a time when my child soul did not suffer at the contradiction between reality and the teachings of Christ,” she said. “As a tiny girl of five, my heart was always breaking for some one else. Now it was for the driver, now for the chamber-maid, now for the laborer. Sometimes it was those poor oppressed serfs. Always I have known that I would go safely through everything and see the bright days of freedom. Always I was listening for the ringing of the bells, and wondering that they kept me waiting.” At the opening meeting of the Council of the Republic, I saw Kerensky place the gavel in her hands and ask her to be the first presiding officer. It was as gracious and beautiful a tribute as has ever been paid to woman anywhere; and the old grandmother, a white kerchief over her snowy curls and another around her neck, graced her position. I saw Babushka for the last time just before the fall of the Kerensky government. Immediately afterward she went into retirement. Stories of her arrest were spread broadcast over the world, but they were not true. The young revolutionists, though they differed from her politically, had far too profound a feeling of respect for her down in their hearts to harm her. She lived quietly in Petrograd for a time, on the fifth floor of an apartment-house. Later she went to Moscow.