Page:Through Bolshevik Russia - Snowden - 1920.djvu/140

 My girl friend was a Manchester lass who was working in a Soviet office. I asked her if she was happy, and she looked wistful and said she was hungry a good deal and that she could "do very well with some stockings and underclothes," but that she liked her work, which was translating, and had no complaints on that score.

"But," I said, "why don't you go home? Are you being kept here against your will?"

"Oh no," she replied very quickly, "I could go home if I wanted to, but—" and here a deep, red blush spread over her pretty face and told me her story without further words. She will not leave until her lover can come too. As a productive worker he cannot be spared at present. So the two stay and work and love and hope together.

I find these complications not uncommon. There is an English colony in Petrograd, suffering greatly from lack of means, and anxious to have the British Government send out a Commissioner to help them in various ways. They have full leave from the Russian Government to repatriate their members. But domestic tangles lie in the way. A mother has two daughters, one British and the other (perhaps by marriage) Russian. She cannot bear to go away and leave one child behind, and the Russian child is not at present acceptable to the British Government. Or a lover is involved as in the case of Miss W.