in my doll's house.'

"`But why?' I asked, `should you wish to return to that particular
doll's house? Having taken, like Nora, the bold step against convention,
having made yourself in the conventional sense disreputable, having dared
to be free, why should you not take advantage of your freedom?
As the greatest modern writers have pointed out, what you called your
marriage was only your mood. You have a right to leave it all behind,
like the clippings of your hair or the parings of your nails.
Having once escaped, you have the world before you. Though the words
may seem strange to you, you are free in Russia.'

"He sat with his dreamy eyes on the dark circles of the plains,
where the only moving thing was the long and labouring trail of smoke
out of the railway engine, violet in tint, volcanic in outline,
the one hot and heavy cloud of that cold clear evening of pale green.

"`Yes,' he said with a huge sigh, `I am free in Russia. You are right.
I could really walk into that town over there and have love all over again,
and perhaps marry some beautiful woman and begin again, and nobody could
ever find me. Yes, you have certainly convinced me of something.'

"His tone was so queer and mystical that I felt impelled to ask
him what he meant, and of what exactly I had convinced him.

"`You have convinced me,' he said with the same dreamy eye,
`why it is really wicked and dangerous for a man to run away
from his wife.'

"`And why is it dangerous?' I inquired.

"`Why, because nobody can find him,' answered this odd person,
`and we all want to be found.'

"`The most original modern thinkers,' I remarked,
`Ibsen, Gorki, Nietzsche, Shaw, would all rather say that what we
want most is to be lost: to find ourselves in untrodden paths,
and to do unprecedented things: to break with the past and belong
to the future.'

"He rose to his whole height somewhat sleepily, and looked round on
what was, I confess, a somewhat desolate scene--the dark purple plains,
the neglected railroad, the few ragged knots of malcontents.
`I shall not find the house here,' he said. `It is still eastward--
further and further eastward.'

"Then he turned upon me with something like fury, and struck the foot
of his pole upon the frozen earth.

"`And if I do go back to my country,' he cried, `I may be locked up in a
madhouse before I reach my own house. I have been a bit unconventional
in my time! Why, Nietzsche stood in a row of ram