“Well, that’s a religious sect—from Persia, I think—and they are quite the rage. They are priests, you understand, and they give lectures, and teach you all about the immanence of the divine, and about reincarnation, and Karma, and all that. Do you believe any of those things?”
“I can’t say that I know about them,” said he.
“It is very beautiful and strange,” added the other. “It makes you realize what a perplexing thing life is. They teach you how the universe is all one, and the soul is the only reality, and so bodily things don’t matter. If I were a Babist, I believe that I could be happy, even if I had to work in a cotton-mill.”
Then Mrs. Winnie rose up suddenly. “You’d rather look at the pictures, I know,” she said; and she pressed a button, and a soft radiance flooded the great vaulted gallery.
“This is our chief pride in life,” she said. “My husband’s object has been to get one representative work of each of the great painters of the world. We got their masterpiece whenever we could. Over there in the corner are the old masters—don’t you love to look at them?”
Montague would have liked to look at them very much; but he felt that he would rather it were some time when he did not have Mrs. Winnie by his side. Mrs. Winnie must have had to show the gallery quite frequently; and now her mind was still upon the Persian transcendentalists.
“That picture of the saint is a Botticelli,” she said. “And do you know, the orange-coloured robe always makes me think of the swami. That is my teacher, you know—Swami Babubanana. And he has the most beautiful delicate hands, and great big brown eyes, so soft and gentle—for all the world like those of the gazelles in our place down South!”
Thus Mrs. Winnie, as she roamed from picture to picture, while the souls of the grave old masters looked down upon her in silence.
CHAPTER VI.
Montague had now been officially pronounced complete by his tailor; and Réval had sent home the first of Alice’s street gowns, elaborately plain, but fitting her conspicuously, and costing accordingly. So the next morning they were ready to be taken to call upon Mrs. Devon.