Page:The way of Martha and the way of Mary (1915).djvu/38

16 "Yes. Everybody likes him."

Fedor is certainly a relief after the sternness of Sasha. He is affable, he is interested in the prices of all things, and is bourgeois, but he says that success and money and luxury do not tempt him. He would like to give up everything and try and find out what life means. He would like to be a wanderer as I am, or to go into a monastery.

All the same, the career assigned to him seems to be that of a lawyer, and as a lawyer, not as a vagabond, will he win the hand of Katia. He will live with her as a wealthy bourgeois European, and not as a Russian.

This modern Kief is a mill where purely Russian types go in and Europeans come out.

"Once a European, always a European," says some one.

"A European may become an American," I hazard.

"But he can never become a Russian again."

"What am I?" asks Katia of me, "a Russian or a European?"

"I don't know. You are changing perhaps. But keep a Russian!"

One evening, on Katia's advice, I took a sledge across the snow-covered city to Solovtsof's theatre and saw Jealousy performed, a story that has had a vast vulgar success in Russia. It is by Artsibashef, the author of the most notorious books of the last ten years. He is the voice of the bourgeois, of