Even my little princess friend, Orchidée, who had been educated in France and whose natural sympathies were all with the Allies, admitted to me that she hoped the Germans would come soon. We were lunching together. In the party were an English officer and a Russian who before the Revolution was in charge of the Grand Duchesses’ hospital train. “You don’t really mean it,” I said. “Yes, I do,” she answered. “I like the English, and I should like to have them come and rule us; but they will not. If the Germans come, we can keep our titles and our estates. Why shouldn’t we want them?” “And you?” I asked, turning to the other Russian. “Do you feel the same?” “Yes,” he answered. “It is the only hope for us. The Bolsheviki will take all.” They were demonstrating the Marxian theory that one’s conduct is dictated by one’s economic desires. They were being forced by the new order to give up their privileges, and to ask them to like it was to expect the impossible. For some of them the situation was tragic. They were products of the system, just as were the uneducated Russian peasant and the class-conscious revolutionary workers. One man characterized his country for me by saying: “Russia is like a badly baked loaf of bread. It is raw on one side and burned on the other. The great peasant mass is left in ignorance and poverty, while the upper class has nothing but luxury and useless culture.” The luxury was disappearing. The “useless culture” did them little good in a state that recognized no value but that of production. The land-owner, suddenly bereft of his estates, like the military man deprived of his epaulets and his salary, was frequently a pathetic figure. The life of the dying class is not easy. On the streets of Moscow and Petrograd, officers were shoveling snow, or selling newspapers, or trucking baggage to buy the barest necessities. In some cases, the women, proving less unfit than the men of the family, had become the bread-winners. The old picture money of the Tsar’s day disappeared, and the post-revolutionary issues of currency, practically the only exchange in the market, were accepted with a single sneering word--“Kerensky.” The Anarchists grew more daring in the days immediately following the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly. “What is the use of government?” the Anarchists asked. “The Bolsheviki promised you bread, and promised you peace. Where is your bread? Where is your peace? All governments are alike--the Bolsheviki just the same as the others! You must take the factories! Take the land! Why do you wait?”