talk thus, seated at his table, without a quiver of compunction.
As I sat in a corner of the drawing room after dinner, everything round me looked blurred to my eyes. I seemed to be seated by the head of my great, insulted Motherland, lying there in the dust before me, in dejection, shorn of her glory. I cannot tell what a profound distress overpowered my heart.
How incongruous seemed the memsahibs there, in their evening dresses, the hum of English conversation, and the ripples of laughter. How richly true for us is our India of the ages, how cheap and false the hollow courtesies of an English dinner party.
(70)
Puri,
14th February: 1893.
Some people have a mind like a photographic wet plate;—unless they fix the picture then and there, it is apt to get spoilt. That is the case with me. I want at once to write down in a letter whatever of interest I see. Such a quantity of things to describe passed before me on the way from Cuttack to Puri, I could have recorded any number of vivid pictures had I but time to write them down as I saw them.
