She turned them over as she went to her room, and there among them was
a bulky envelope addressed in Mrs Quantock's great sprawling hand,
which looked at first sight so large and legible, but on closer
examination turned out to be so baffling. You had to hold it at some
distance off to make anything out of it, and look at it in an abstracted
general manner much as you would look at a view. Treated thus, scattered
words began to leap into being, and when you had got a sufficiency of
these, like glimpses of the country seen by flashes of lightning, you
could hope to get a collective idea of it all. The procedure led to the
most promising results as Mrs Lucas sat with the sheets at arm's length,
occasionally altering the range to try the effect of a different focus.
"Benares" blinked at her, also "Brahmin"; also "highest caste";
"extraordinary sanctity," and "Guru." And when the meaning of this
latter was ascertained from the article on "Yoga" in her Encyclopaedia,
she progressed very swiftly towards a complete comprehension of the
letter.

When fully pieced together it was certainly enough to rivet her whole
attention, and make her leave unopened the rest of the correspondence,
for such a prelude to adventure had seldom sounded in Riseholme. It
appeared, even as her husband had told her at lunch, that Mrs Quantock
found her cold too obstinate for all the precepts of Mrs Eddy; the
True Statement of Being, however often repeated, only seemed to inflame
it further, and one day, when confined to the house, she had taken a
book "quite at random" from the shelves in her library, under, she
supposed, the influence of some interior compulsion. This then was
clearly a "leading."

Mrs Lucas paused a moment as she pieced together these first sentences.
She seemed to remember that Mrs Quantock had experienced a similar