Naturally the name of General Kouropatkin, Commander-in-Chief of the Armies, was on everybody’s tongue. The prolonged resistance of Port Arthur engrossed much of the conversation, as was natural. People began by making a hero of its defender, General Stoessel, and a heroine of his wife. We subscribed at the French Embassy to present him with a sword of honour. In later days he seemed to be looked upon as no better than a common traitor. I met the Stoessels once or twice at Petrograd; they both looked very well fed, and I began to doubt their many privations, but of course it may have been a question of temperament, for with some people stoutness is a sign of illness and not of health and good living.
My first experience of a “little corner of English life” occurred at a dinner party at the Napiers’, the English Military Attaché and his wife. For the first time I saw wine-glasses placed at the side and not in front of the plate, and I recall my first emotion, not knowing which were mine, fearing a mistake. I hope I did not drink from my neighbour’s glass, but I can hardly be sure that I did not commit myself.
One day before my departure, my Aunt de Nicolay said to me, “I acknowledge that you have two great qualities: punctuality and discretion.”
_Mon Dieu_, punctuality--yes! I had always been trained to it at school and at home, and I still remember the call to order of my father if we had the misfortune to keep the horses waiting a moment at the front door, those precious animals at whose orders, I maintained, one had always to be.
As for discretion? Perhaps it may be thought that it has been a trifle torn on the brambles along the road of life. Oh, very little, not so much as it might have been--not so much as you think perhaps! If there is a need of pardon? Well, give it or do not give it. Give it at least to the child of twenty with her eyes hardly yet opened on life.
I went again to lovely Michaelovka for a little; and it was with a heart as heavy as lead that I turned my back on this country to which I belong in part, on this country which I had learnt to adore, where the sun is so loath to set or to rise, this country of dreams, beneath its glorious spring verdure, again of dreams beneath its snowy white mantle, to this glorious Neva on which I had so often watched the huge barges silently gliding on the still waters, bearing to Petrograd their great loads of silver-birch wood from distant Finland, manned by bargemen in scarlet shirts which gave such a touch of colour and brightness to the landscape.