She was dressed always in clinging dresses of Eastern silk, and
as she was so small, and her long black hair hung straight down
her back, you might have taken her for a child. She spoke
little, and in a low voice, like gentle music; and she seemed,
wherever she was, to be alone.

Through that soul I seemed to touch and take hold upon the East.
And first there was the wisdom of the East. I have never known
any one who seemed to exist on such "large draughts of
intellectual day" as this child of seventeen, to whom one could
tell all one's personal troubles and agitations, as to a wise old
woman. In the East, maturity comes early; and this child had
already lived through all a woman's life. But there was
something else, something hardly personal, something which
belonged to a consciousness older than the Christian, which I
realised, wondered at, and admired, in her passionate
tranquillity of mind, before which everything mean and trivial
and temporary caught fire and burnt away in smoke. Her body was
never without suffering, or her heart without conflict; but
neither the body's weakness nor the heart's violence could
disturb that fixed contemplation, as of Buddha on his
lotus-throne.

And along with this wisdom, as of age or of the age of a race,
there was what I can hardly call less than an agony of sensation.
Pain or pleasure transported her, and the whole of pain or
pleasure might be held in a flower's cup or the imagined frown of
a friend. It was never found in those things which to others
seemed things of importance. At the age of twelve she passed the
Matriculation of the Madras University, and awoke to find herself