It is amazing to watch their readiness to receive
dependent souls whom they are in no kind of way qualified to
protect--but they do their best, and although the result is invariably
bad for everybody's character, a great deal of affection is created.
As we walked to the cinema she asked him, very gently and rather shyly,
about his home and his people and English life. She must have asked all
her English guests the same questions, but Bohun, I fancy, gave her
rather original answers. He let himself go, and became very young and
rather absurd, but also sympathetic. We were, all three of us, gay and
silly, as one very often suddenly is, in Russia, in the middle of even
disastrous situations. It had been a day of most beautiful weather, the
mud was frozen, the streets clean, the sky deep blue, the air harshly
sweet. The night blazed with stars that seemed to swing through the haze
of the frost like a curtain moved, very gently, by the wind. The
Ekateringofsky Canal was blue with the stars lying like scraps of
quicksilver all about it, and the trees and houses were deep black in
outline above it. I could feel that the people in the street were happy.
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