All the same, the career assigned to him seems to be that of a lawyer, and as a lawyer, not as a vagabond, will he win the hand of Katia. He will live with her as a wealthy bourgeois European, and not as a Russian. This modern Kief is a mill where purely Russian types go in and Europeans come out. “Once a European, always a European,” says some one. “A European may become an American,” I hazard. “But he can never become a Russian again.” “What am I?” asks Katia of me, “a Russian or a European?” “I don’t know. You are changing perhaps. But keep a Russian!” One evening, on Katia’s advice, I took a sledge across the snow-covered city to Solovtsof’s theatre and saw _Jealousy_ performed, a story that has had a vast vulgar success in Russia. It is by Artsibashef, the author of the most notorious books of the last ten years. He is the voice of the bourgeois, of the new commercial middle-class Europeans being turned out at such an astonishing rate by the modern industrialism of Russia. He concerns himself almost entirely with sexual problems, and the relation of woman to man. His outlook in life is something like that of Bernard Shaw, but his criterion in life is not racial progress so much as physical happiness. He mirrors the life of those whose aim is money, whose relaxation is feasting and flirtation. He reflects the growing non-Christian Russia, the increasing mass of Parisian types of men and women obscuring the real Russia. A crowded theatre, nobody in evening dress, many women pretentiously dressed, many rich town-folk in the stalls, clerks and their sweethearts or their wives in other parts of the house. The play is very well staged, well upholstered, and is vociferously received. What they are cheering is nothing more or less than a series of opinions about women, a disparagement and uglification of the symbol “woman,” of what is holiest. But to quote the opinions gives the play. In woman first of all it is necessary to awaken curiosity. Women do not value those who pray to them. Woman, of course, likes admiration, but only gives herself to the man who despises her a little. Men are most interesting when they are angry. Woman is only interesting, vivacious, clever, when she is bathed in the atmosphere of love. Man is interested in his business, in sport, in thought, but woman is only interested in herself, and if she seems to have interest in other things it is only feigned. Her sole object is to make herself more alluring, more interesting. We seek Lauras and Beatrices, not knowing that such creatures are only the incarnation of male fancy, and do not and cannot exist. Girls are charming, but when you marry one you find her to be a tedious _baba_ like the rest. At the piano they tinkle, “I am a princess, I am a princess.” All young girls are princesses, but you never come across a queen.