'That was why the hotel Metropot came as such a relief. It was an-lent, Victorian and redolent of those days' when Moscow was the setting {for all the brilliance of Imperial days. The dining room is to be wondered at. It is big, heavy in furniture and colouring, with a huge stained-glass roof, and artificially lighted at night from huge gilt candelabra, whence the candles have departed to give place rows of horrid, frosted and white incandescent bulbs. In the centre a fountain played over a small pool in
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.