Will they famish all their days
For a future built of fury in a present scarce begun?"


"Most Precious friend ... please visit me!"

The one thing in India that never happens is the expected. If the actual
thing itself does occur, then the manner of it sets up so many unforeseen
contingencies that only the subtlest mind, and the sanest and the least
hidebound by opinion, can hope to read the signs fast enough to
understand them as they happen. Naturally, there are always plenty
of people who can read backward after the event; and the few of those
who keep the lesson to themselves, digesting rather than discussing
it, are to be found eventually filling the senior secretaryships, albeit
bitterly criticized by the other men, who unraveled everything afterward
very cleverly and are always unanimous on just one point--that the fellow
who said nothing certainly knew nothing, and is therefore of no account
and should wield no influence, Q. E. D.

And as we belong to the majority, in that we are uncovering the course
of these events very cleverly long after they took place, we must at
this point, to be logical, denounce Theresa Blaine. She was just as
much puzzled as anybody. But she said much less than anybody,
wasted no time at all on guesswork, pondered in her heart persistently
whatever she had actually seen and heard, and in the end was almost
the only non-Indian actor on the stage of Sialpore to reap advantage.
If that does not prove unfitness for one of the leading parts, what does?
A star should scintillate--should focus all eyes on herself and interrupt
the progress of the play to let us know how wise and
beautiful and wonderful she is. But Tess apparently agreed with Hamlet