And it's a good thing." He smiled--that strange, happy, confident mysterious smile that I had seen first on the Petrograd platform.

Then he turned and walked slowly towards the house.
What Nikitin had said about Trenchard's expectation of "romantic war" was perhaps true, in different degrees, of all of us.

Even I, in spite of my earlier experience, felt some irritation at this delay, and to those of us who had arrived flaming with energy, bravery, resolution to make their name before Europe, this feasting in a country garden seemed a deliberate insult.

Was this "romantic war ?" These long meals under the trees, deep sleeps in the afternoon when the pigeons cooed round the little red bell-tower and the pump creaked in the cobbled courtyard and the bees hummed in the garden?
Bees, cold water shining deep in the well, and the samovar chuckling behind the flower-beds, and fifteen versts away the Austrians challenging the Russian nation!...

"You know," Andrey Vassilievitch said to me, "it's very disheartening." Marie Ivanovna at the end of the first week spoke her mind.