The greatest part of our hopes rests on women.  I behold their thirst for knowledge.  It is admirable.  Look how they absorb, how they are making it their own.  It is miraculous.  But what is knowledge? ...I understand that you have not been studying anything especially—­medicine for instance.  No?  That’s right.  Had I been honoured by being asked to advise you on the use of your time when you arrived here I would have been strongly opposed to such a course.  Knowledge in itself is mere dross.”

He had one of those bearded Russian faces without shape, a mere appearance of flesh and hair with not a single feature having any sort of character.  His eyes being hidden by the dark glasses there was an utter absence of all expression.  I knew him by sight.  He was a Russian refugee of mark.  All Geneva knew his burly black-coated figure.  At one time all Europe was aware of the story of his life written by himself and translated into seven or more languages.  In his youth he had led an idle, dissolute life.  Then a society girl he was about to marry died suddenly and thereupon he abandoned the world of fashion, and began to conspire in a spirit of repentance, and, after that, his native autocracy took good care that the usual things should happen to him.  He was imprisoned in fortresses, beaten within an inch of his life, and condemned to work in mines, with common criminals.  The great success of his book, however, was the chain.

I do not remember now the details of the weight and length of the fetters riveted on his limbs by an “Administrative” order, but it was in the number of pounds and the thickness of links an appalling assertion of the divine right of autocracy.  Appalling and futile too, because this big man managed to carry off that simple engine of government with him into the woods.  The sensational clink of these fetters is heard all through the chapters describing his escape—­a subject of wonder to two continents.  He had begun by concealing himself successfully from his guard in a hole on a river bank.  It was the end of the day; with infinite labour he managed to free one of his legs.  Meantime night fell.  He was going to begin on his other leg when he was overtaken by a terrible misfortune.  He dropped his file.

All this is precise yet symbolic; and the file had its pathetic history.  It was given to him unexpectedly one evening, by a quiet, pale-faced girl.  The poor creature had come out to the mines to join one of his fellow convicts, a delicate young man, a mechanic and a social democrat, with broad cheekbones and large staring eyes.  She had worked her way across half Russia and nearly the whole of Siberia to be near him, and, as it seems, with the hope of helping him to escape.  But she arrived too late.  Her lover had died only a week before.