Nicholas II, who only a few months before had sat behind the sealed door, was sleeping in exile on the edge of a Siberian swamp. Kerensky, his successor, was spending the night hours in a desperate effort to reach the front and rally the troops to prevent the very thing that had just happened. I recalled, with a little sigh of regret, that this day in this very spot I was to have lunched with the Minister-President of Russia. In one of the rooms where we lingered for a few moments, looking curiously about us, a crowd of soldiers had gathered, and they were talking together excitedly. I noticed them, and once I caught the proletarian word of scorn, “Bourgeoisie!” But it never occurred to me that we could be the object of their discussion. Suddenly a young _commissaire_ came up to us. “These men can not understand,” he said, “who you are, and why you are here. They are quite excited and angry about it. They think perhaps you may have come to rob. I told them I would question you, and if you had no right to be here we would arrest you.” We presented our passes. He examined them, and turned to the men, who were by this time quite obviously casting unfriendly glances in our direction. “Tavarischi,” he said, “these passes are stamped, just as my own is, with the blue seal. See it! You may be sure that if they had not the right they would not be here with this.” The men examined the paper quizzically, and nodded. They took an informal vote upon the subject, and it was agreed that we should be allowed to go free. A few minutes later we followed them down the stairs and out of the palace, the last people to leave except for the guards who were detailed to remain on duty. The next day a decree was passed making the mammoth red building a people’s museum, that it might be preserved from ever again becoming a point of dispute in political conflicts. I did not see the women soldiers. They were in another wing of the palace. The following morning the city rang with stories of their abuse; but in the investigation that was made by Madame Torkova, one of the leaders of the Petrograd Duma, whose inclinations were decidedly anti-Bolshevik, most of these tales were disproved. Some of the women were taken to the headquarters of the Pavlovsky Regiment, and held there until relatives could bring them feminine wearing apparel. A few others, who had no way to obtain this, were allowed to go in their soldiers’ uniforms. From a number of the girls I heard the story of that night. It seems that class feeling had for the moment wiped out every other instinct. As they marched them away in the dark, some of the men, in their excitement, took them by the arms and shook them, shouting: “Why do you fight us? Why do you go against your own class? You are working-women. Why do you fight with the bourgeoisie and the counter-revolutionists?”