“Ah, _orchidée_,” she said. “I like that; they are so beautiful.” Then, nodding her head with a wise little smile, she said. “But I know what you mean. You mean that I am a parasite.” Always after that I called her “Orchidée.” The pathos of her helplessness appealed to me, and also a certain loyalty that kept her in Petrograd with her husband, when most of her friends had fled to the Caucasus or the Crimea or gone abroad. “I love my husband,” she told me. “It is very bourgeois of me, I know, but I can’t help it.” Her husband was an officer in the Guard, and she lived in hourly terror of his arrest. This day he had escaped, but there were others who were not so fortunate. At lunch-time several familiar figures were absent from the dining-room, and here and there a woman with troubled eyes sat alone. In the following days we lived as much in the dark as to the actual state of affairs as if we had been in America. Kerensky declared Korniloff counter-revolutionist and traitor. The Workmen and Soldiers in Petrograd, convinced that their Revolution and their throats were both in danger, worked day and night in the munition plants, and prepared to throw a trench around the great city. Another part of the populace looked upon Korniloff as a deliverer, and waited impatiently for his coming. All over Russia the people, unable to get the truth, traded in rumor. Down in the Caucasus the newspapers came out with lurid details of battles in the Nevsky and thousands of dead bodies strewing the streets. While we were still in the dark as to what was happening, I went one morning to the Winter Palace, and climbed the stairs to Katherine Breshkovskaya’s little room. Through all the troubled days of the last six months, she had been the right-hand lieutenant of Kerensky. I found her, slipping her cloak over her calico wrapper and starting out to rally the soldiers to the support of the government. She was seventy-three years old. I had formed the habit of dropping in on the Babushka, who loved Americans and always had a radiant welcome. I climbed the marble stairs as one would climb a mountain, to get away from the tangle of petty things below, to look out over a distant vista, to see a broad view. Always I came away with the sense of having been on the heights, close to something big and fine, with a grandmotherly kiss upon my cheek and the memory of a friendly hand-clasp. Once, knowing well the burden of her answer, but curious to know how she would phrase it, I asked: “What do you think of Kerensky?” She lifted her chin high and, with the ring of sincere faith in her voice, spoke in her quaint English: