I did not, as I had feared, find that my
task filled me with depression. I experienced " the ground-swirl of the perished leaves of hope." I felt that I had concluded this year, 1939, with an act of piety towards the capitalist world in which I hitherto have lived. I had preserved for posterity some faded remnant of past pleasures and travels, and my grand- children would turn the pages as one examines a herbarium, gazing with interest at those desiccated tufts which once were potentilla on the Matterhorn. Or would they? I am encouraged by recalling a story told me by an observant woman who had just returned from Soviet Russia. She had visited one of those bright villas at Yalta in the Crimea which had once been the property of the Tsarist aristocracy and which are now used as winter resorts by the more deserving of the proletariat. The furniture and accoutrements of these villas have for the most part been preserved and are enjoyed by the workers with gingerly contempt. In one room, in one villa, she came across an elderly workman profoundly engrossed in a large volume which he held in his hand. It was an old family album bound in green plush and contain- ing photographs of what used to be known as " cabinet size." The book was opened on the portrait of an elderly gentleman -leaning on a rusticated parapet and wearing a fur coat and a bowler hat of strange design. Underneath was written, in a faded hand, " Sergei Pavlovitch: 1889." * * * *
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