ss the slates again with as much
agility as the monkey himself had displayed.

When he had gone Sara stood in the middle of her attic and thought of
many things his face and his manner had brought back to her. The sight
of his native costume and the profound reverence of his manner stirred
all her past memories. It seemed a strange thing to remember that
she--the drudge whom the cook had said insulting things to an hour
ago--had only a few years ago been surrounded by people who all treated
her as Ram Dass had treated her; who salaamed when she went by, whose
foreheads almost touched the ground when she spoke to them, who were
her servants and her slaves. It was like a sort of dream. It was all
over, and it could never come back. It certainly seemed that there was
no way in which any change could take place. She knew what Miss Minchin
intended that her future should be. So long as she was too young to be
used as a regular teacher, she would be used as an errand girl and
servant and yet expected to remember what she had learned and in some
mysterious way to learn more. The greater number of her evenings she
was supposed to spend at study, and at various indefinite intervals she
was examined and knew she would have been severely admonished if she
had not advanced as was expected of her. The truth, indeed, was that
Miss Minchin knew that she was too anxious to learn to require
teachers. Give her books, and she would devour them and end by knowing
them by heart. She might be trusted to be equal to teaching a good
deal in the course of a few years. This was what would happen: when
she was older she would be expected to drudge in the schoolroom as she
drudged now in various parts of the house; they would be obliged to
give her more respectable clothes, but they would be sure to be plain
and ugly and to make her look somehow like a servant. That was all
there seemed to be to look forward to, and Sara stood quite still for
several minutes and thought it over.

Then a thought came back to her which made the color rise in her cheek
and a spark light itself in her eyes. She straightened her thin little
body and lifted her head.

"Whatever comes," she said, "cannot alter one thing. If I am a
princess in rags and tatters, I can be a princess inside. It would be
easy to be a princess if I were dressed in cloth of gold, but it is a
great deal more of a triumph to be one all the time when no one knows
it. There was Marie