Now all that remained for us was this horrible place with its endless looking-glasses, its bare gleaming floors and the intolerable noise through its open windows of carts, soldiers, horses, the smell of dung and tobacco, and the hot air, like gas, that flung the dust into our faces.
Beyond the vague terrors of our uncertainty was the figure, seen quite clearly by all of us without any sentiment, of Russia.

Certainly Trenchard and I could feel with less poignancy the appeal of her presence, and yet I swear that to us also on that day it was she of whom we were thinking.

We had been, until then, her allies; we were now her servants.
By Russia every one of us, sitting in that huge room, meant something different.

To Goga she was home, a white house on the Volga, tennis, long evenings, early mornings, holidays in a tangled wilderness of happiness.

To Sister K---- she was "Holy Russia," Russia of the Kremlin, of the Lavra, of a million ikons in a million little streets, little rooms, little churches.