LUXURY TO LAUNDRY

Evening Post, Volume CIX, Issue 125, 30 May 1930, Page 8

LUXURY TO LAUNDRY

RUSSIAN LADY'S STRAITS

(From "The Post's" Representative) ..- ---' SYDNEY, 23rd May.

Her Excellency Lady Stonehaven en« tertained at afternoon tea at Admiralty pouse recently an elderly woman whose humble occupation would not, in ordinary circumstances, give her the open, sesame door to Government House— the charming and cultured . Madame Sophie Rimsky-KorsakOff, 'one of the old Russian aristocracy, and now employed'ns an ironer in a city laundry."'

Her Excellency , certainly did the* thing properly. Madame, behind whoso life is a poignant story of suffering and privation and loss under the Reds in Russia, was not only invited to afternoon tea at .Federal Government Honso in Sydney with the sole surviving mem- ■/ ber of her family—a little daughter-— but was conveyed to the vice-regal home, overlooking the harbour in tho Governor-General ,'s 'auncli.

This pleasant-faced Russian lady has had more than her share of trouble, for since shV.came to Sydney her husband —a colonel in the Russian Imperial Army under the old regime^—and her elder daughter both have died. But she has the. supreme gift* of.being-able to smile. through everything; and' says 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, cheerful, disposition, and a capacity for ''smiling through." *

Madame Rimsky-Korsakoff,- ones among the social elect of aristocratic Russia,1 now, a supremely happy' and. contented . laundry Worker, is one. of them. ... ■.. ;' ../.. '■■.■:.'." . ...,'.