his that had made The Store what it had been-she had robbed him of that.

One would suppose that this was about all she could have managed to do, and yet when I came back another season she had found even another way of making him suffer.

I cannot tell exactly what she did to The Store, nor how she was clever enough to find out that he and the older men and the despised loafers were an asset. Probably the women of the summer colony who had got to coming there had made her conscious of how quaint the loafers were and what "a character" Huntington was.

The Store outwardly was more as it had been when I first knew it. It had its air of disorder; the ship-chandler's was cunningly in evidence-some seachests to sell, and some whales' teeth and whales' vertebra-how can I explain it! It was as though one had turned an old-fashioned house into a museum; it was like a town becoming so conscious of its quaintness that its inhabitants tell you themselves that it is like Cranford.

She was exploiting the store, using it and Huntington's personality, playing them up.

This didn't come to me all at once; it took me time to analyze it. And at the same time slowly the sinister conviction forced itself on me that he knew what she was doing. She ran the whole business now and he was just there, doing his real estate and helping around.

From the beginning of the European War he had, like many men of his age, followed each detail, and now, since we had joined, it had become his passion. He had an extraordinary number of books on the war-a whole war library, in fact, and this in him was odd, because he had formerly been close in his own personal expenditures, as though he must pay through his own asceticism for his habits of generosity.

There were no more scenes now in public. Both Maida, who was now quite grown up and beautiful, and her mother went in for appreciation, and his wife's present caressing manner toward him was as instinctive as her instinct for punishment had been before. Mrs.

Huntington was a primitive woman, you see, and of course it was pleasanter to love her man than to be angry with him. Indeed, now that she had it all her own way, she prided herself on the fact that, as she put it, "Mr. Huntington was not practical. She herself was busy and happy, really a pleasant spectacle, and that is why I am sorry for her now, in spite of myself, though I loved Huntington and though I saw, step by step, what it was she did to him.

I was there the afternoon when she gave him his nunc dimittis, his leave to depart in peace. That she was totally unaware of what she was doing I knew. After all, she only put into words a perfectly obvious situation, but one that he had not up to then quite faced, because, after all, he was busy all the time and had the illusion of usefulness.

It was the time the envoys came to Boston, and Huntington, with his eager following of every detail, wished that he might go. He confessed himself sentimental enough to wish to see Joffre.

"Why don't you go?" said Mrs. Huntington, cordially. Huntington, cordially. There was no harm in this fad. Books and little trips cost much less than credit. "Why don't you go?" she repeated.

66

And leave you all alone?" he protested. "And the season just beginning!"

"Oh, my dear," she said, lightly, "I don't need you a bit. Run away and stay as long as you like." There was in her manner that which said, as far as the business was concerned, he need never come back at all. And yet she enveloped him at the same time with a look that was all warmth and tenderness. She loved him, you see, though she thought he was a fool.

She had turned away and didn't notice the somber, speculative gaze he bent upon her. He stood looking out of the window a long time. long time. He was seeing himself in relation to life as it really was. He might have been facing his death sentence. Indeed, he had just learned that he had been attacked by some disease of the spirit. disease of the spirit. He had been crowded out of his work. There wasn't a place for them both in The Store. She had taken from him even the illusion of work.

No, there are some things that should never be put into words.

He came to me that night. He sat down and we smoked together in quiet, veiling ourselves from each other by trivial and commonplace comment. At last

"I've come to say good-by," he told me. There was a gravity in his manner that made me ask:

"You are planning a long stay?" "I'm not coming back," he said, simply. "I'm going to enlist.'

He knew how much I had been in the whole thing, and then I had been very close to him in the years that had passed since I had first rented the house on Tom Nevers's hill. There was nothing to be said.

"My wife-" he brought out at last. "She won't ever understand. She will probably come to you about it." He

hadn't come to ask me any favor; I took it that it was more a warning than anything else, that she would try to come and seek some enlightenment.

There was something in his manner that made me sure he had told her, and that her despair at losing him had lashed her to fury, since she could not understand how completely she dismissed him that afternoon-gave him, as I said, his leave to depart in peace.

I know that he will never come back. I wonder often, when I pass The Store and see Mrs. Huntington inside, making the most, you may be sure, of her husband's valor, how many other men of forty-odd there are who would not take this door of escape if they could do it as honorably as Huntington. There are more men than he who are not going to war to make the world safe for democracy.

This indeed is a revolution, I said to myself, as I set out to find my friend. In the old days Vera Petrovna had hated the police and all their ways with a unique and fervid hatred. I am sure that, when I knew her twelve years ago, she would not have entered a police station willingly. She had, however, She had, however, been dragged there once or twice by force. The trouble was that she had studied scientific agriculture abroad and wanted to teach the peasants how to improve their method of raising and preparing flax. But the old government had smelled sedition in her enterprise, interfered with her, and so had made a revolutionist of her.

I had foreseen that this new Russia I was revisiting would be profoundly different from the Russia I had known, but the last thing I would have expected of the revolution was that I should find Vera Petrovna installed in a police station. All that had been bad in the old Russia, all that had stood in the way of the up-struggle of her people, had been typified for her in that one wordpolice." I would not have been more surprised to hear that she had become. secretary to the Czar.

I found that her mother had not yet

learned the phraseology of the revolution. The sign "Police Station" had been painted out when the doubleheaded eagle of imperialism had been pulled down. The grim old building had been rechristened "Militia Headquarters. But in spite of this change of names the place looked very like other police stations.

وو

A young student was "at the desk." He lacked the cold, hardened calm of the typical police captain. He seemed unhappy. He was torn by a continual struggle between a natural irritability at unreasonableness and a determination to be sympathetic and brotherly. He addressed the people who came to him as "Comrade," but he had been tricked so often that he regarded them with profound suspicion. The people who bring their troubles to the police station are alike the world around-wives whose husbands did not come home the night before and wives whose husbands. came home to beat them, lost children, pickpockets and those whose pockets have been picked, beggars and burglars, sneak thieves and worse. The revolution had not produced any panacea for such unfortunates.

I found Vera Petrovna up-stairs in what had been, in the old days, the bedroom of the chief of police. She was surrounded by piles of cards which represented bread and meat and sugar. They had to be counted and stamped that day, for distribution on the morrow.

"You look tired," I said, when the greetings were over.

"It's only these food-cards," she said, apologetically. "There's a terrible rush with them once a month. Last time somebody stole five thousand sugar-cards, so I'm checking them up myself. It's extra work. I've been at it till two or three in the morning the last few days."

I suggested that it was lunch-time, but she said she must finish this job, so I set to work on it, too. With the help of occasional glasses of tea we checked up the month's food-cards by five o'clock, and then went out in search of a restaurant and a real meal.

"I can't tell you much about the revolution," Vera Petrovna said, when we had found a table. "I've been too busy to see any of it. I was working in a hospital-night duty-the month before the revolution, so I couldn't attend any of the meetings. I was to have a week off, after this month of night duty, for a rest, but the first day I was homeit was two days after the revolutionthey called me up on the telephone and asked me to help with the bread-cards at the police station. It was awful." She made an expressive gesture of chaos. "Such a crowd! The old police had run away. The station-house had been closed for two days. All these people struggling to get in. I had never realized how many people there are who need a police station!" Some of the first bewilderment of it showed in her face as she thought again of that discovery. "It's a social institution-just like a church or a school.

"I telephoned to all the lawyers I know, but they were sick or busy. None of them would come. So I had to take charge myself. It was rather terrible. There were three days before they appointed a commissaire.

"And I've stayed here ever since, working as his assistant. Desperately busy too busy to see much of the revolution."

But it seems to me that Vera Petrovna has seen more deeply into the revolution than many of the editors and politicians I have met here in Petrograd. There has been too much romanticism, too many high-sounding words, too much disembodied idealism, about the revolution. She has been in constant, passionate, fatiguing struggle with reality. And, of course, the real problem of the revolution is how to make the new government work. It is a glorious thing to have overthrown the rotten old régime. But it is necessary to contrive a new machine, in accord with the new ideals of liberty and human dignity, which will

work. High sentiments and sonorous phrases will not make the revolution succeed. All these uninspiring details, which are not mentioned in Magna Chartas and Declarations of the Rights of Man-the distribution of food, the prevention of crime, the regular operation of street-cars, the sanitary disposal of sewage-all these things must be attended to. The most eloquent orations on liberty, equality, and fraternity -even the singing of the "Marseillaise

-are as stone to those who want bread. A perilously large number of Russians thought that freedom could be secured by a decree. It was a new and painful lesson to many of them to learn that 'eternal vigilance" is the coin we must pay for liberty, that the maintenance and perfection of free institutions demand harder work, more sustained, earnest, and disciplined effort, than submission to tyranny.

There was an intense soul tragedy back of Kerensky's speech in which he said that in the first days of the revolution he had thought of Russians as "free men" and that now he was beginning to fear that they were only revolted slaves."

Vera Petrovna has had to face these real problems of the revolution in the vivid, concrete experiences of the police station.

He

The very first day she was in charge, before any regular authority had been constituted, the janitor of a lodginghouse rushed in with the news that a little stream of blood had appeared under the door of one of his rooms. had knocked, but had received no answer, and so had come to the stationhouse to report. Vera Petrovna with two student boys of the volunteer militia hurried to the house, and on the way she scolded the janitor for not having broken in the door. Perhaps a life might have been saved by quick action. He had crossed himself and said that he had no right to break in a door without the presence of a magistrate. There were no magistrates to be found those troublous days, and Vera Petrovna, always impatient of official red-tape, ordered the boys to break in the door. It was a case of suicide. The man was quite dead. She left one of the boys in charge and

sent the other for an undertaker, and returned herself to the rush of work at the station-house, and forgot to make. any formal report of the affair. Now a woman who claims to have been the wife of the suicide asserts that he had a diamond ring and a gold watch, which have disappeared, and accuses these amateur police of having stolen them. After all, free countries as well as despotisms have passed laws forbidding unauthorized persons from breaking down doors.

"And the funny thing about it is," Vera Petrovna said, "that in the old days, whenever any one said the police had stolen something, I always believed it."

That first day at the police station she had another painful and instructive experience. A youngster of fifteen was brought in by a crowd of citizens who accused him of theft. He had just persuaded her that he was a victim of unjust suspicion when one of the student militia, who had read Sherlock Holmes, thought of looking in his pockets. They were gorged with the proceeds of the theft. This led to a search of the records, and it was found that he had been a professional thief since the age of eight.

"And so," Vera Petrovna said, with a sigh, "I had to sign his commitment to prison-the first after the revolution. I couldn't have turned him loose just to go on stealing. It wouldn't have been fair to honest people, would it?”

I reassured her as well as I could, and she sipped her tea for a minute thoughtfully.

"It is lack of time," she said, bitterly. "That boy might have been reformed. He wasn't all bad. I wish I could have tried. But there was too much to do. I didn't have time. And the revolution had to send him to jail."

"He was a legacy of the old régime,” I said.

She was desperately perplexed. The revolution, which to her was a high and noble ideal, was continually coming into conflict with grim and sordid facts.

"That's it," she said, finding some comfort in my phrase. "We did not finish with the old régime just by overthrowing it. It left us so many legacies.'

VOL. CXXXVI.-No. 813.-43

The first night of the revolution there had been two highway robberies and one murder with theft in that district, and popular rumor said it was the work of the "Black Wolf”—a notorious, almost legendary, criminal. After the revolutionists had liberated the political prisoners, the warders had opened the doors of the jails and turned loose the common-law felons as well. And so the "Black Wolf," who had just been sentenced to a life term in Saghalin for a long series of ghastly crimes, was free.

The next night there was more evidence of his activity. A detached house had been broken into, an old lady killed, and much money stolen. Vera Petrovna and her student volunteers had no idea of how to find the culprit. About eleven in the morning the telephone-bell rang and a member of the old detective force, who was in hiding, reported that he knew where to lay hands on the "Black Wolf." There was nothing else to be done. This offer of help from the old régime had to be accepted. The "Black Wolf" was recaptured and one of the old policemen reinstalled in the station-house.

"He is dishonest, vile-unspeakable," Vera Petrovna said, "but he is also invaluable. We could not get along without him. He knows all the old criminals.

"And there is another one of the old force back-a clerk. None of us knew how to keep the records, and there are licenses to issue, and passports, and funeral permits, births to register. Life goes on just the same in spite of the revolution—oh, so many papers. He came back after a few days and asked for work. He said he would support the revolution, and, besides, he had a wife and three children and no work. He is a queer little dried-up office man, but a wonder at keeping the records straight. But he doesn't know what honesty is. Three times we've sent him away for taking what he calls 'tips.' It is rank bribery. But after three or four days everything is in confusion and he turns up, repentant, promising to be honest. And we have to take him on again.

"I told you about the theft of those sugar-cards. I've really been afraid to investigate it. It must have been this