he middle of pools and melting
snow; he was dirty, tired, hungry, and really not far from tears. Poor
Henry was very, very young....

He scarcely looked at the Neva as he crossed the bridge; all the length
of the Quay he saw only the hunched, heavy back of the old cabman and
the spurting, jumping rain, the vast stone grave-like buildings and the
high grey sky. He drove through the Red Square that swung in the rain.
He was thinking about the eight roubles.... He pulled up with a jerk
outside the "France" hotel. Here he tried, I am sure, to recover his
dignity, but he was met by a large, stout, eastern-looking gentleman
with peacock feathers in his round cap who smiled gently when he heard
about the eight roubles, and ushered Henry into the dark hall with a
kindly patronage that admitted of no reply.

The "France" is a good hotel, and its host is one of the kindest of
mortals, but it is in many ways Russian rather than Continental in its
atmosphere. That ought to have pleased and excited so sympathetic a soul
as Henry. I am afraid that this moment of his arrival was the first
realisation in his life of that stern truth that that which seems
romantic in retrospect is only too often unpleasantly realistic in its
actual experience.

He stepped into the dark hall, damp like a well, with a whirring
snarling clock on the wall and a heavy glass door pulled by a rope
swinging and shifting, the walls and door and rack with the letters
shifting too. In this rocking world there seemed to be no stable thing.
He was dirty and tired and humiliated. He explained to his host, who
smiled but seemed to be thinking of other things, that he wanted a bath
and a room and a meal. He was promised these things, but there was no
conviction abroad that the "France" had gone up in the world since Henry
Bohun had crossed its threshold. An old man with a grey beard and the
fixed and glittering eye of the "Ancient Mariner" told him to follow
him. How well I know those strange, cold, winding passages of the
"France," creeping in and out across boards that shiver and shake, with
walls pressing in upon you so thin and rocky that the wind whistles and
screams and the paper makes ghostly shadows and signs as though unseen
fingers moved it. There is that smell, too, which a Russian hotel alone,
of all the hostelries in the world, can produce, a smell of damp and
cabbage soup, of sunflower seeds and cigarette-ends, of drainage and
patchouli, of, in some od