I gave it up and went away, thinking that I should forget. But
I did not forget. I was quick with a new hope, or at any rate
with a new aspiration, and that secret child of holy desire grew
and grew within my soul, till at length it flashed upon me that
this soul of mine was itself the hidden Master from which I must
learn my lesson. No wonder that those Eastern friends could not
give his name, seeing that whatever they really knew, as
distinguished from what they had heard, and it was little enough,
each of them had learned from the teaching of his own soul.

Thus, then, I too became a dreamer with only one longing, the
longing for wisdom, for that spirit touch which should open my
eyes and enable me to see.

Yet now it happened strangely enough that when I seemed within
myself to have little further interest in the things of the
world, and least of all in women, I, who had taken another guest
to dwell with me, those things of the world came back to me and
in the shape of Woman the Inevitable. Probably it was so decreed
since is it not written that no man can live to himself alone, or
lose himself in watching and nurturing the growth of his own
soul?


It happened thus. I went to Rome on my way home from India, and
stayed there a while. On the day after my arrival I wrote my name
in the book of our Minister to Italy at that time, Sir Alfred
Upton, not because I wished him to ask me to dinner, but for the
reason that I had heard of him as a man of archeological tastes