ear, and perhaps rise up in a body, and refuse to have
anything more to do with such a disgraceful person.

Or perhaps you are trying to persuade some of them to learn to read,
knowing that, if you can succeed, there will be so much more chance of
teaching them, but they assure you it is not the custom for women in
that village to read, which unhappily is true; or it may be you are
telling them, as you tell those you may never see again, of the Love
that is loving them, and in the middle of the telling a baby howls, and
all the attention goes off upon it; or somebody wants to go into the
house, and a way has to be made for her, with much gathering together
and confusion; or a dog comes yelping round the corner, with a stone at
its heels, and a pack of small boys in full chase after it; or the men
call out it is time to be going; or the women suggest it is time to be
cooking; or someone says or does something upsetting, and the group
breaks up in a moment, and each unit makes for its separate hole, and
stands in it, looking out; and you look up at those dark little
doorways, and feel you would give anything they could ask, if only they
would let you in, and let you sit down beside them in one of those
rooms, and tell them the end of the story they interrupted; but they
will not do that. Oh, it makes one sorrowful to be so near to anyone,
and yet so very far, as one sometimes is from these women. You look at
them, as they stand in their doorways, within reach, but out of reach,
as out of reach as if they were thousands of miles away. . . .

Just as I wrote those words a Brahman woman came to the door and looked
in. Then she walked in and sat down, but did not speak. Can you think
how one's heart bounds even at such a little thing as that? Brahman
women do not come to see us every day. She pulled out a book of
palm-leaf slips, and we read it. It told how she was one of a family of
seven, all born deaf and dumb; how hand in hand they had set off to walk
to Benares to drown themselves in the Ganges; how a Sepoy had stopped
them and taken them to an English Collector; how he had provided for the
seven for a year, then let them go; how they had scattered and wandered
about, visiting various holy places, supported by the virtuous wherever
they went; and how the bearer would be glad to receive whatever we would
give her. . . . She has gone, a poor deaf and dumb and wholly heathen
woman; we could not persuade her to stay and rest