t has
learnt it?"

"Has learnt Russian?" exclaimed Piers. "I didn't know--I had no
idea----"

"Wonderful girl! I suppose she thinks it a trifle."

"It's so long," said Otway, "since I had any news of Miss Derwent. I
can hardly consider myself one of her friends--at least, I shouldn't
have ventured to do so until this morning, when I was surprised and
delighted to have a letter from her about that _Nineteenth Century_
article, sent through the publishers. She spoke of you, and asked me to
call--saying she had written an introduction of me by the same post."

Mrs. Borisoff smiled oddly.

"Oh yes; it came. She didn't speak of the _Vyestnik_?"

"No."

"Yet she has read it--I happen to know. I'm sorry I can't. Tell me
about it, will you?"

The Russian article was called "New Womanhood in England." It began
with a good-tempered notice of certain novels then popular, and passed
on to speculations regarding the new ideals of life set before English
women. Piers spoke of it as a mere bit of apprentice work, meant rather
to amuse than as a serious essay.

"At all events, it's a success," said his listener. "One hears of it in
every drawing-room. Wonderful thing--you don't sneer at women. I'm told
you are almost on our side--if not quite. I've heard a passage read
into French--the woman of the twentieth century. I rather liked it."

"Not altogether?" said Otway, with humorous diffidence.

"Oh! A woman never quite likes an ideal of womanhood which doesn't
quite fit her notion of herself. But let us speak of the other thing,
in the _Nineteenth Century_--'The Pilgrimage to Kief.' For life,
colour, sympathy, I think it altogether wonderful. I have heard
Russians say that they couldn't have believed a foreigner had written
it."

"That's the best praise of all."

"You mean to go on with this kind of thing? You might become a sort of
interpreter of the two nations to each other. An original idea. The
everyday thing is to exasperate Briton against Russ, and Russ against
Briton, with every sort of cheap joke and stale falsehood. All the same
Mr. Otway, I'm bound to confess to you that I don't like Russia."

"No more do I," returned Piers, in an undertone. "But that only means,
I don't like the worst features of the Middle ages. The
Russian-speaking cosmopolitan whom you and I know isn't Russia; he
belongs to the Western Europe of to-day, his country represents Western
Europe of some centuries ago. Not strictly that, of c