itations, and
always I seem to see them with expensive little bags and chains and
Faberje enamels. Men will slave for such women--will carry things for
them, and serve them. They have "success" until they are quite old, and
after they have taken to rouge and paint. A tired woman hardly ever gets
anything carried for her.

_26 January._--A day's march nearer home! This is the Feast of St. Nina.
There is always a feast or a fete here. People walk about the streets,
they give each other rich cakes, and work a little less than usual.

This hotel still keeps its cripples. Prince Murat sits on his little
chair on the landing. Prince Tschelikoff has his heart all wrong; there
is the man with one leg.

Now Mlle. Lepnakoff, the singer, Musaloff, in his red coat, and some
heavy Generals are here. We have the same food every day.

[Page Heading: ENFORCED IDLENESS]

Perhaps I was pretty near having a breakdown when I came abroad, and the
enforced idleness of this life may have been Providential (all my hair
was falling out, and my eyes were very bad, and the war was wearing me
down rather); but to sit in an hotel bedroom or to potter over trifles
in sitting-rooms seems a poor sort of way of passing one's time. To rest
has always seemed to me very hard work. I can't even go to bed without a
pile of papers beside me to work at during the night or in the early
morning!

When the power of writing leaves me, as it does fitfully and without
warning, I have a feeling of loneliness, which helps to convince me of
what I have always felt, that this power comes from outside, and can
only be explained psychically. I asked a great writer once if he ever
experienced the feeling I had of being "left," and he told me that
sometimes during the time of desolation he had seriously contemplated
suicide.

_30 January._--I got a telephone message from Mr. Bevan last night. He
says Baku is too horrible, and there is no news of the cars. People are
telling me now that if instead of cars we had given money, we should
have been feted and decorated and extolled to the skies; but then, where
would the money have gone? Last week the two richest Armenian merchants
in this town were arrested for cheating the soldiers out of thousands of
yards of stuff for their coats. A Government official could easily be
found to say that the cloth had been received, and meanwhile what has
the soldier to cover him in the trenches?

Armenians are certainly an odious se