re I
found H.P.B. alone. I went over to her, bent down and kissed her,
but said no word. "You have joined the Society?" "Yes." "You have read
the report?" "Yes." "Well?" I knelt down before her and clasped her
hands in mine, looking straight into her eyes. "My answer is, will you
accept me as your pupil, and give me the honour of proclaiming you my
teacher in the face of the world?" Her stern, set face softened, the
unwonted gleam of tears sprang to her eyes; then, with a dignity more
than regal, she placed her hand upon my head. "You are a noble woman.
May Master bless you."

From that day, the 10th of May, 1889, until now--two years three and
half months after she left her body on May 8, 1891--my faith in her
has never wavered, my trust in her has never been shaken. I gave her
my faith on an imperious intuition, I proved her true day after day in
closest intimacy living by her side; and I speak of her with the
reverence due from a pupil to a teacher who never failed her, with the
passionate gratitude which, in our School, is the natural meed of the
one who opens the gateway and points out the path. "Folly!
fanaticism!" scoffs the Englishman of the nineteenth century. Be it
so. I have seen, and I can wait. I have been told that I plunged
headlong into Theosophy and let my enthusiasm carry me away. I think
the charge is true, in so far as the decision was swiftly taken; but
it had been long led up to, and realised the dreams of childhood on
the higher planes of intellectual womanhood. And let me here say that
more than all I hoped for in that first plunge has been realised, and
a certainty of knowledge has been gained on doctrines seen as true as
that swift flash of illumination. I _know_, by personal experiment,
that the Soul exists, and that my Soul, not my body, is myself; that
it can leave the body at will; that it can, disembodied, reach and
learn from living human teachers, and bring back and impress on the
physical brain that which it has learned; that this process of
transferring consciousness from one range of being, as it were, to
another, is a very slow process, during which the body and brain are
gradually correlated with the subtler form which is essentially that
of the Soul, and that my own experience of it, still so imperfect, so
fragmentary, when compared with the experience of the highly trained,
is like the first struggles of a child learning to speak compared with
the perfect oratory of the practised