“Why,” said I, “the beast was a beast until a woman loved him. Then he became a man, even a prince. So it is with all of us. When a woman kisses a man, even an ugly, wretched, despised creature, he knows that he has found grace and is precious in the sight of God. When a woman smiles on a man she bids him live. “The world is kept fresh by women and children, by their faith and their influence and their prayers. It would have rotted away but for them. “The love and the faith of women empower men to do things. No man who is out on the adventurous tracks of life but has women behind him, and their love even far away keeps him alive. A woman has cords from her soul to the far-off hands of man, and at her will can empower men to lift their hands and do things. She has spiritual nervous force.” “But if these cords get broken?” said my friend. “Ah, then indeed she is in a different position. She finds herself stranded in destiny. She may become a man’s plaything or worse. Or she may become a militant suffragist or a believer in secular education or a propagandist of eugenism and hygienics.” “In England,” says my friend. “But in Russia we have no woman’s movement. She becomes one of Artsibashef’s women, no more; a man’s plaything and fetish.” Even so. * * * * * What has Artsibashef’s play got to do with Russia? It has a good deal to do with her because of thousands such as Katia who are at the cross-roads. With her cross, hard, but loving student Sasha she might have been poor and unhappy, but, on the other hand, she would save her soul’s health. Whereas with her new-found bourgeois Fedor she may easily enter the world and the atmosphere of _Jealousy_. Among those I visited at Kief was a certain Vassia, a poverty-stricken doctor who worked from morning to night healing men and women, a specialist in internal diseases but practising in a poor district. He did not receive a fifth of his fees; he healed on trust. “They come to me suffering: how can I refuse to help?” he would urge when people tried to harden his heart against those who couldn’t pay. An extraordinarily kind, impracticable fellow, with a flat in complete disorder, with an adopted child but no wife; lazy and thieving servants. Neighbours have stolen much of his furniture, even the ikons from some of the rooms; and the candles burn in the empty corners from which the ikons have been stolen! That is Russian. Vassia and I were invited to an astonishing all-night feast given in honour of Katia on the occasion of her last name-day before marriage. We sat down to dinner at six, we got up from dinner at half-past eleven; we went to the drawing-room and talked and sang till a quarter past twelve, then we returned to the dining-room for tea and coffee and dessert.