If you can imagine the House of Lords standing in the bread-line, you will be able to picture the sight that I saw today. I suppose nothing like it has been seen since the French Revolution—no reversal of social fortunes half so tragic and poignantly dramatic. It was an object lesson to anyone who believes that aristocracy is anything more than environment.

What I really saw was the Imperial Russian Court in miniature. The lady who introduced me was the wife of the Tsar's High Chamberlain, Madame Lubinoff. Her husband, at the commencement of the war, was Civil Governor of Warsaw. Her home was a palace, which is now occupied by Poland's peasant Prime Minister. Today her husband is her secretary at the soup-kitchen which she conducts for the Russian Red Cross; her home is as humble as an artisan's; the people to whom she ministers are princes and princesses in burst out boots and tatters.

I had been told of the wonderful work which Madame Lubinoff has done for her exiled compatriots. I had also been told that her work was soon to be abandoned; that she had sold almost the last of her jewels and that the funds with which the Russian Red Cross at Paris had provided her had given out.

We departed in search of her soup-kitchen at about twelve o'clock—the worst hour you can choose if you wish to get quickly from point to point in Warsaw, for midday is consecrated to funerals. There are so many of them that they form almost a continuous procession. They are of all kinds, from the two-horse hearse, attended by mourning-carriages, to the lonely man and woman, plodding hopelessly through the mud, carrying a little child's coffin between them. In spite of delays we arrived at last at a gateway, leading off a narrow street in one of the least prosperous quarters of the city. The squalid courtyard beyond the gateway was crowded with wolfish men and women. They were a strange collection, brow-beaten and famished. The women wore shawls over their heads; they looked typical slum-dwellers. Many of the men were in tattered uniforms; all of them were unshaven and cringing as pedlars. We had to force our way up the narrow stairs to Madame Lubinoff's office, into which we were ushered by a grave-faced servant who turned out to be her husband. The Bolshevists arrested him in Petrograd and imprisoned him for ten months in the dreaded fortress of St. Peter and St. Paul—which goes far to account for his crushed demeanour. It was his wife who rescued him, by risking her own life and bribing his gaolers, which has nothing to do with the present story.

Madame Lubinoff is a gay and beautiful woman, who hovers always between tears and laughter. The tears are real, but the laughter is forced. One marvels at the courage of her tremendous acting. It all started, this work that she is conducting, she told us, with the sale of a ring. When she discovered how many lives one ring could save, she sold more. She had been luckier than most of her Russian friends who, when the Bolshevist regime set in, had lost everything; whereas she, inasmuch as Warsaw was Polish, had managed to preserve many of her personal belongings, though of course her Russian estates were confiscated. The present building in which she has established her soup-kitchen had been a Russian Church. She gained permission from the priest to use it by means of flattery; she kissed his hand, which is an honour paid only to a bishop. She laughed. For the money with which to run it she sold her jewels and kept on selling them, till the Russian Red Cross in Paris got to hear about her. For a time they helped with contributions, but last October they notified her that they could help no longer. Then the American Relief had come to the rescue with a donation from the fund left by Mr. Harkness to be expended on the Intelligencia of Europe. And now that was exhausted. What was she going to do next? Ah, that was the question! If she did not do something the seven thousand men, women and children whom she was feeding would play leading rtles in the daily funerals. She laughed and blinked the tears out of her eyes. They did things better in the French Revolution; the guillotine was so very much quicker. Perhaps we would like her to show us round.

Outside the door, doing clerking at a ricketty table, a grubby yet distinguished man was sitting. She introduced him as Prince Ouhtomsky. He shook our hands with a manner of extreme courtliness; when we were out of earshot, she revealed his story. When Warsaw was a part of Russian Poland he had been one of the richest men in the country. He had belonged to the hereditary land-owning class, his grants having been made directly to his family by the Tsar. He was now working for his dinner and two dollars and a half a week. When she found him, he and his princess had been living in a room which they shared with other people. He had been trying to keep the wolf from the door by manufacturing cigarettes. They were not good cigarettes—cigarette making was not his profession. Besides, it was illegal in Poland; it was a Government monopoly. So she had rescued him and given him the job of sealing; envelopes. By allowing him to believe that he was earning his keep, she prevented him from being too unhappy.

As we passed out through the crowd of be-shawled women, various of them tried to attract Madame Lubinoff's attention. Some she embraced, addressing them as “My dear Princess,” “My dear Baroness,” “My dear Countess.” Despite their sodden appearance, their display of etiquette was magnificent and exacting. They drew themselves up with a flash of haughtiness as though their Cinderella appearance of poverty were no more than fancy-dress. One was reminded that they had once belonged to the most polished caste of Europe. The effect was pitiful and fantastic. Eight years ago it would have been madness to have proposed that they could ever have sunk to this depth. We no longer wondered that Madame Lubinoff wept while she laughed.

At the top of the stairs she pointed out a haggard fellow, attired in what was left of a uniform. He had been one of the smartest officers in the crack regiment of the Russian Guards. He had come to Warsaw a beggar. She had been puzzled by a familiar resemblance. Then she had remembered—she had been his partner, when things were in their heyday, at an Imperial Ball.

As we crossed the courtyard to the dining-room we were accosted—at every step we were accosted—by a bullet-headed old soldier who wore the highest military decoration that the Tsar could bestow. It was pinned against his greasy collar. He was General Rogovich. His request was humble. He was hungry; he would like to split kindling in exchange for food. “My General, it is very unfortunate,” our hostess told him, “but I have more than enough kindling split already.” He kissed her hand, submitting to her authority and yet, like an unwanted dog, he followed.

In a booth, at the entrance to the room where meals were served, the most brilliant comedy actor of the old Petrograd was collecting tickets. Inside wilted women of exalted nobility were pouring soup and piling dishes for a pittance as waitresses.

The curious point was that they no longer looked noble; they looked their part. The utensils were mostly make-shift; the cups were condensed-milk cans, with ragged metal edges which had been presented when empty by the American Relief Administration. At the tables sat a large part of what Mr. Gorlof, the Russian attachi, calls “the spiritual wealth of Russia.” They were professors, musicians, actors, writers, financiers, doctors, engineers—the kind of people whose brain value never figures in a budget, but who constitute the realest asset of any nation. These were the few who were left from the great mass who had been tortured and shot.

At this point an old white-bearded man came up to us; he was General Prigorowsky, who had been one of the most brilliant of strategists when Russia was fighting on the side of the Allies. His face was intensely sad and his eyes were deep with unfathomable melancholy. At sixty years of age he was alone in the world, unloved, unprotected and almost unloveable. He had no idea what had become of his wife or children. For a time he and one son had been imprisoned together. Every day they had been led out and told they would be shot. One day only his son had been taken; after that he had remained alone in his cell. Having escaped, here he was, penniless in a foreign land which would rather be without him.

From the eating-room we were conducted to the kitchen. Again we were invited to shake hands with students, army officers and princesses. I had never realized that there were so many princesses in the world. In a miserable outhouse four women, who were professors' wives and resembled rag-pickers, huddled on a bench peeling beets into a basket.

We had climbed a stair and were pausing on a landing, when I happened to look out of the window. Shambling aimlessly round a wood-pile in the yard below was a forlorn little figure. He wore a dingy velvet hat—a girl's—made like a tam-o'-shanter, a girl's coat which trailed about his ankles, and hoots which were a mere pretence. Upon enquiry I was informed that he was the Baron Hael Von Holdstein. His father had been a millionaire. His mother was the daughter of a Lord Mayor of Petrograd and was working in the soup-kitchen as a waitress. The little Baron, having nowhere else to go, came with her in the early morning and waited all day for her.

Beyond the door one heard the sound of sewing-machines revolving. We were admitted by a woman who had been the wife of the Tsar's coachman. Her husband had insisted on accompanying the Tsar into exile, so of course she was a widow. In closely packed rows, resembling a sweat-shop, women of all ages were stitching shirts. There were two princesses of the same family. One was the Princess Meschersky, who had been wife of the Consul General at Shanghai; the other was an orphan, a child of fifteen, who had recently escaped via Finland. Most of them have no homes and sleep beneath the machines where they work. In fact, Madame Lubinoff told me, the wretched building is as crowded by night as by day. Even the desk in her office is slept on.

“And now you have seen for yourselves,” she laughed, “how all these people are dependent on me. And they are not lazy. They have forgotten that they were princes and have learnt to be cobblers, and carpenters, and tailors. If I had the means to start workshops, I already have the contracts. But I have not even the means to feed them. I simply dare not tell them. I shall have to run away.”

“And shall you run away?” we asked.

Her eyes became defiant. “Never.”

“Then where are the funds to come from?”

She paused. “From God, perhaps. Yes, I think from God.”