"Aren't the Russians splendid?" the boy cried to me a few days later. "They're just right, you see, because they've got the two sorts of men in them both at the same time—the football-playing, hard-hitting sort, and the other sort that loves poetry and likes beautiful things."
"Yes, you are right. That is just what makes Russians so fascinating," I said.
There was cholera in Petrograd—and we had told Little Yeogh Wough that he would only be allowed to go there once or twice and would have to spend most of his time waiting on the ship off Cronstadt, while we went to the capital, and thence on to Moscow.
But we had reckoned without Little Yeogh Wough himself.
Coming back from Moscow to Petrograd, we were thunderstruck to see, just outside the Empress Mother's palace, in the magnificent Nevski Prospect, a fine-built, boyish figure, that stepped out very gaily and held its head very high.
"Surely that can't be Roland!" I exclaimed in amazement.
"It certainly is Roland," declared his father grimly.
Little Yeogh Wough—wandering through Petrograd alone!
He was looking at a carriage drawn by four long-tailed, coal-black, fiery-eyed horses, and at the dazzling uniform of an officer who sat in the carriage. Then he hurried into a side-street and we got out of the droshky we were in and followed him on foot.