“But you understand so well how to handle the material things in the world,” protested Kate.  “You seem so appreciative and so competent.  If you have learned so much, what is the sense of shutting it all up in a cell?”

“Did you never read of Purun Bhagat,” asked Mrs. Leger smilingly, “who was rich with the riches of a king; who was wise with the learning of Calcutta and of Oxford; who could have held as high an office as any that the Government of England could have given him in India, and who took his beggar’s bowl and sat upon a cavern’s rim and contemplated the secret soul of things?  You know your Kipling.  I have not such riches or such wisdom, but I have the longing upon me to go into silence.”

The lips from which these words fell were both tender and ardent; the little gesticulating hands were clad in modish, mouse-colored suede; orris root mixed with some faint, haunting odor, barely caressed the air with perfume.  Kate looked at her companion in despair.

“I must be an outer barbarian!” she cried.  “I can imagine religious ecstasy, but you are not ecstatic.  I can imagine turning to a convent as a place of hiding from shame or despair.  But you are not going into it that way.  As for wishing to worship, I understand that perfectly.  Prayer is a sort of instinct with me, and all the reasoning in the world couldn’t make me cast myself out of communion with the unknown something roundabout me that seems to answer me.  But what you are doing seems, as I said, so obsolete.”

“I am looking forward to it,” said Mrs. Leger, “as eagerly as a girl looks forward to her marriage.  It is a beautiful romance to me.  It is the completely beautiful thing that is going to make up to me for all the ugliness I have encountered in life.”

For the first time a look of passion disturbed the serenity of the high-bred, conventional face.

Kate threw out her hands with a repudiating gesture.

“Well,” she said, “in the midst of my freedom I shall think of you often and wonder if you have found something that I have missed.  You are leaving the world, and books, and friends, and your son for some pale white idea.  It seems to me you are going to the embrace of a wraith.”

Mrs. Leger smiled slowly, and it was as if a lamp showed for a moment in a darkened house and then mysteriously vanished.

“Believe me,” she reiterated, “you do not understand.”

Kate helped her on the train, and left her surrounded by her fashionable bags, her flowers, fruit, and literature.  She took these things as a matter of course.  She had looked at her smart little boots as she adjusted them on a hassock and had smiled at Kate almost teasingly.

“In a month,” she said, “I shall be walking with bared feet, or, if the weather demands, in sandals.  I shall wear a rope about my waist over my brown robe.  My hair will be cut, my head coiffed.  When you are thinking of me, think of me as I really shall be.”