I looked up over the garden-wall. The tree-tops were yellow. While we had been locked in our room, the season had changed. Autumn was upon us. I shivered. There was a lavender mist over the city dimming the radiance of the gold and silver church domes. How beautiful Kiev was! The church-bells were so mellow-toned; and the children's shrill laughter and cries as they played in the garden. But it tired me. Every impression seemed to bruise me. Peter bought some little Polish cakes, and we had hot tea to cheer us up--three and four glasses of tea. Good-night. Sometimes, when I think of you, I don't see all of you, but instead a particular gesture, or I hear an inflection of voice that is too familiar to be borne. Now I see mother's hands and they are beautiful. RUTH. _September._ _Dearests:--_ Every day now we go out into the garden. We play ball and play tag in the wind to get warm. There is a private hospital at one end of our apartment house, supported by a wealthy Polish woman. Two or three times a week she visits the patients, young officers who go out into the garden with her and kiss her hand and talk and flirt. She sits on a garden-bench surrounded by her young men, a big woman in black, with a long black veil, talking vivaciously, using her hands in quick, expressive gestures, patting their cheeks, leaning forward to give their hands an impulsive squeeze. When she laughs, which is often, the black line of a mustache on her upper lip makes the white of her teeth whiter still. The days when she isn't there, the convalescents flirt with the nurses. There is nothing horrible about this hospital. The patients are only slightly wounded, and wear becoming bathrobes when they lounge round. The window-ledges of the rooms are gay with flowers. Almost always a phonograph is going, "Carmen," or "Onegin," or "Pagliacci." Sometimes, Peter and I one-step to the music on the pavement outside, and the officers and nurses crowd to the windows and clap and cry, "Encore!" Often, after sundown, when the children have gone indoors, and we go out for a walk before dinner, we see a patient with a bandage around his head, perhaps, but both arms well enough to be clasping a pretty nurse in them. They laugh and we laugh. There is no cynicism about it. It's bigger than that, it seems to me.