knew where you were with him, and in the uncertain world in which poor Bohun found himself that simply was everything.  Bohun would have denied it vehemently if you told him that he had once looked down on Lawrence, or despised him for his inartistic mind.  Lawrence was “a fine fellow”; he might seem a little slow at first, “but you wait and you will see what kind of a chap he is.”  Nevertheless Bohun was not able to be for ever in his company; work separated them, and then Lawrence lodged with Baron Wilderling on the Admiralty Quay, a long way from Anglisky Prospect.  Therefore, at the end of three weeks, Henry Bohun discovered himself to be profoundly wretched.  There seemed to be no hope anywhere.  Even the artist in him was disappointed.  He went to the Ballet and saw Tchaikowsky’s “Swan Lake”; but bearing Diagilev’s splendours in front of him, and knowing nothing about the technique of ballet-dancing he was bored and cross and contemptuous.  He went to “Eugen Onyegin” and enjoyed it, because there was still a great deal of the schoolgirl in him; but after that he was flung on to Glinka’s “Russlan and Ludmilla,” and this seemed to him quite interminable and to have nothing to do with the gentleman and lady mentioned in the title.  He tried a play at the Alexander Theatre; it was, he saw, by Andreeff, whose art he had told many people in England he admired, but now he mixed him up in his mind with Kuprin, and the play was all about a circus—­very confused and gloomy.  As for literature, he purchased some new poems by Balmont, some essays by Merejkowsky, and Andre Biely’s St. Petersburg, but the first of these he found pretentious, the second dull, and the third quite impossibly obscure.  He did not confess to himself that it might perhaps be his ignorance of the Russian language that was at fault.  He went to the Hermitage and the Alexander Galleries, and purchased coloured post-cards of the works of Somov, Benois, Douboginsky, Lanceray, and Ostroymova—­all the quite obvious people.  He wrote home to his mother “that from what he could see of Russian Art it seemed to him to have a real future in front of it”—­and he bought little painted wooden animals and figures at the Peasants’ Workshops and stuck them up on the front of his stove.

“I like them because they are so essentially Russian,” he said to me, pointing out a red spotted cow and a green giraffe.  “No other country could have been responsible for them.”

Poor boy, I had not the heart to tell him that they had been made in Germany.

However, as I have said, in spite of his painted toys and his operas he was, at the end of three weeks, a miserable man.  Anybody could see that he was miserable, and Vera Michailovna saw it.  She took him in hand, and at once his life was changed.  I was present at the beginning of the change.