THE day after a church festival is always the Feast of St Lombard. Outside all the pawnbrokers’ establishments one sees crowds of poor people drawn up in line—men, women, children, but mostly women. It is a pitiable sight. Each person is carrying the article to be pledged, and whether it be a samovar or a chair, or a petticoat or a pair of trousers, it is never wrapped up. Russians are not ashamed. The queue which I saw near the Tverskaya a street long, the day after my return from Sergievo, would have been thought a disgrace to any English city, but the Russians looked on with equanimity. And to walk from end to end, from the pawnbroker’s door to the last person who has just hurried up with a pledge, was like reading a chapter from the darkest pages of Gorky. One sees children of sad aspect, with bewildered eyes; young girls as yet honest and clean, but selling the last things of a home; raging women, weeping women and laughing women, drunkards and drudges; or besotted men of the sort who drink away their wives’ and daughters’ honour, 95hopeless home thieves who would steal away even the clothes from a bed and turn them in............