y him far. Ten years hence the world will realize that
Maurice Durant is a great painter. But in those ten years he must
work hard."

As if to show how little he cared he left off working hard and
bestirred himself for news of Frida Tancred.

It came at last--from Poona of all places. Frida wrote in high
spirits and at length. "I like writing to you," she said, "because I
can say what I like, because you always know--you've been there.
Where? Oh, everywhere where I've been, except Whithorn-in-Arden.
And, now I come to think of it, you were there, too--for a
fortnight" ("three weeks--three long weeks--and for your sake,
Frida!"). "No, I'm not 'coming home.' Why _must_ I 'stop somewhere'?
I can't stop, didn't I tell you? I can only strike down where it's
deepest.

"It seems to be pretty deep here. If I could only understand these
people--but what European can? They mean something we don't mean....
You should see my Munshi, a terrifically high-caste fellow with a
diminutive figure and unfathomable eyes. I am trying to learn
Sanscrit. He is trying to teach me. We sit opposite each other at a
bamboo table with an immense Sanscrit dictionary between us. He
smiles in his sleeve at my attempt to bridge the gulf between Europe
and Asia with a Sanscrit dictionary. He is always smiling at me in
his sleeve. I know it, and he knows that I know it, which endears me
to him very much.

"My Munshi is a bottomless well of Western wisdom. He takes
anything that Europe can give him--art, literature, science,
metaphysics. He absorbs it all, and Heaven only knows what he is
going to do with it, or it with him. He swallows it as a juggler
swallows fire, and with about as much serious intention of
assimilating it. That smile of his intimates that the things that
matter to us do not matter to him; that nothing matters--neither
will nor conscience, nor pain nor passion, nor man nor woman, nor
life nor death. There's an attitude for you!

"That attitude is my Munshi, and my Munshi is Asia."

He smiled. He had seen Frida in many attitudes, Frida in love with
nothing, Frida in love with a person, Frida in love with a thing.
Here was Frida in love with an idea. It was just like her. She was
seeing Asia from the Asiatic point of view.

"Meanwhile," she went on, "there's a greater gulf fixed between my
Munshi and my 'rickshaw coolie than there is between me and my
'rickshaw coolie, or my Munshi and me."

He wondered if she meant to remind