t so safe, with Janchu sleeping in his crib in
the corner. The creeping, submissive procession seemed a dream. It was
incredible to think of only the wall of a house separating our security
from those hundreds of fainting, persecuted Jews!

We are still here--waiting for our passports to be returned. Of course
no mail from you has been forwarded to me here, as Peter is hourly
expecting me back. I am cut off from all I love most in the world. The
Russian frontier takes on a new significance once you're inside it. I
hope you don't forget me. Sometimes you seem millions of miles away--and
then I look in my heart and find you there. I love you.

RUTH.

_July 25, 1915._

The Tchedesky Pension is full of Poles--refugees from Poland and the
wooded Russian provinces.

Pan Tchedesky himself was formerly an enormously wealthy landowner near
Kiev. He loves to tell how he drove through town behind six white
horses. Gambling ruined him, and to pay his debts he sold one acre after
another to the Jews, who cut down the timber and ruined the land. Of
course, where there are no trees the rainfall is scarce. The crops dried
up, and finally Pan Tchedesky and his wife and children were forced into
the city. There remained enough of his former property to start a
_pension_. The rooms are full of the remains of his splendor--heavy gilt
mirrors, thick, flowered carpets, a Louis XVI set in the drawing-room,
upholstered in faded blue brocade.

Pan Tchedesky is a memorial of his own life; a relic suggesting an
earlier opulence. He is big-framed, but his flesh is shrunken, as though
the wind of conceit were oozing out of him day by day. His cheeks and
stomach hang flabbily. His blond mustache is getting thin and discloses
his full, sensual lips. His hands are thick and soft, always stained
with nicotine. He lives in constant terror of his wife, and all the
pockets of his coats are burned full of holes from his hiding his
cigarettes in them when he thinks he hears his wife coming. I have never
seen her, but she is the invisible force that keeps the _pension_
running, and controls her husband by her knowledge of his past failures.

"My wife is an executive woman--very executive," he says, shaking his
head sorrowfully.

The bills are made out by her. Occasionally he intercepts the maid
carrying her back the money, and extracts enough to pay a small per cent
of his I O U