FROM LUXURY TO LAUNDRY.

Press, Volume LXVI, Issue 19941, 30 May 1930, Page 2

FROM LUXURY TO LAUNDRY.

RUSSIAN LADY'S STRAITS. OTBOH ODB <>W» COBMSPOKITCKT.) SYDNEY, May 23. Her Excellency Lady Stonehaven entertained at afternoon tea at Admiralty House recently an elderly woman whoso humble occupation would not, in ordinary circumstances, give her the open door to Government House —the charming and cultured Madame Sophie Rimsky-Korsa-koff, one of the old Russian aristocracy, and now employed as an ironer in a city laundry. Her Excellency certainly did the thing properly. Madame, behind whose life is a poignant story of suffering and privation and loss under th«j Reds in Russia, was not only invited to afternoon tea at Federal Government House in Sydney with the sole surviving member of her family—a little daughter—but was conveyed to the vice-regal home overlooking the harbour in the Governor-GeneraPs launch.

This pleasant-faced Russian lady has had more than her share of trouble, for since she came to Sydney her husband—a colonel in the Russian Imperial Army under the old regime—and her elder daughter have died. But she has the supremo gift of being able to smile through everything, and snys she is infinitely .happier in free Australia, even as a laundry employee, than amid the shambles of Red Russia, where she lost everything, and never knew what next was going to happen. There are people who are rich without money, because they have that which money cannot always buy—a genial, sunny, cheerfnl disposition, and a capacity for "smiling through." Madame Rimsky-Korsakoff, once among tho social elect of aristocratic Russia now a supremely happy and contented laundry worker, is one of them.