She moved beside me with her wonderful light step—the poise and balance of a nymph in the Parthenon frieze.
“How do you see things?”
“See? That is the right word. I see things—I never reason about them. They are. For her they move like figures in a sum. For me every one of them is a window through which one may look to what is beyond.”
“To where?”
“To what they really are—not what they seem.”
I looked at her with interest.
“Did you ever hear of the double vision?”
For this is a subject on which the spiritually learned men of India, like the great mystics of all the faiths, have much to say. I had listened with bewilderment and doubt to the expositions of my Pandit on this very head. Her simple words seemed for a moment the echo of his deep and searching thought. Yet it surely could not be. Impossible.
“Never. What does it mean?” She raised clear unveiled eyes. “You must forgive me for being so stupid, but it is my mother who is at home with all these scientific phrases. I know none of them.”
“It means that for some people the material universe—the things we see with our eyes—is only a mirage, or say, a symbol, which either hides or shadows forth the eternal truth. And in that sense they see things as they really are, not as they seem to the rest of us. And whether this is the statement of a truth or the wildest of dreams, I cannot tell.”