At ten o’clock next morning Ambassador Root sat in a corner of the huge drawing-room in his suite at the Winter Palace with his back to the light. Half a dozen of us foreign correspondents sat stiffly upon the edges of flower-brocaded chairs drawn in a circle around him, while he introduced the Washington Code into Petrograd. The Washington Code is a Maxim silencer. It is a gentleman’s agreement to which an occasional lady is reluctantly admitted. A great man sits in a corner--with his back to the light--and announces that he would like to be able to discuss quite openly everything that happens and even to have the benefit of your advice. Of course, if he is to do so, he must be assured that all he says will be held in strictest confidence. You--perhaps because you are flattered by the great man’s confidence, perhaps because of your curiosity--joyfully consent. Sometimes you consent only because you know the folly of cutting off your ears merely because your lips are sealed. The Washington Code was the only check to speech in all that great land swamped beneath a flood of words. Those morning conferences became a regular institution. We did most of the talking while Mr. Root sat silently listening. Occasionally he made one of those simple, pat, nut-shell comments for which he has such an amazing talent, and we regretted the “made in America” rules for correspondents. From time to time, special missions took flying trips out of Petrograd to study some particular phase of the complex situation. The military men went to the front; the naval representatives took in a mutiny of the Black Sea Fleet; the bankers investigated Russia’s depleted treasury; and the religiously inclined went to Moscow to discover the future status of the Russian Church. There was no official life of any kind. When the Commission donned its Prince Alberts and paid its first two formal visits, they found the Foreign Minister in a sack-suit and tan shoes and the members of the Council dressed like workingmen. The young men of the Provisional Government were growing old overnight with the burden of the task upon them. And the members of the Soviet were groping endlessly for that hidden road which idealism and reality may travel in equity. Every man, from the young Minister President, Alexander Kerensky--whose health was already giving way under the frightful strain of trying to make the dilapidated economic machine inherited from the Tsar’s régime supply the exhaustive demands of war and revolution--to the most insignificant little delegate in the Soviet, was working with his sleeves rolled up to remold Russia nearer to his heart’s desire.