Page:The way of Martha and the way of Mary (1915).djvu/43

Rh "But if these cords get broken?" said my friend.

"Ah, then indeed she is in a different position. She finds herself stranded in destiny. She may become a man's plaything or worse. Or she may become a militant suffragist or a believer in secular education or a propagandist of eugenism and hygienics."

"In England," says my friend. "But in Russia we have no woman's movement. She becomes one of Artsibashef's women, no more; a man's plaything and fetish."

Even so.

What has Artsibashef's play got to do with Russia? It has a good deal to do with her because of thousands such as Katia who are at the cross-roads. With her cross, hard, but loving student Sasha she might have been poor and unhappy, but, on the other hand, she would save her soul's health. Whereas with her new-found bourgeois Fedor she may easily enter the world and the atmosphere of Jealousy.

Among those I visited at Kief was a certain Vassia, a poverty-stricken doctor who worked from morning to night healing men and women, a specialist in internal diseases but practising in a poor district. He did not receive a fifth of his fees; he healed on trust.

"They come to me suffering: how can I refuse