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irreverence of ours for his opinions cannot be pleasing to him; and thus the feeling of this great wrong we do him rises, and becomes proportional to the magnitude of our "selfishness" and "huffishness." Hence his disenchantment, and the sincere pain he feels at finding the Lodge and all of us so much below the mark of his ideal. He laughs, for my defending H.P.B.; and giving way to a feeling unworthy of his nature, very unfortunately forgets that his is just the disposition to warrant friends and foes at calling him "protector of the poor" and like names, and that his enemies among others, never fail to apply such epithets to himself; and yet, far from falling upon him as an insult, that chivalrous feeling which has ever prompted him to take the defence of the weak and the oppressed and to redress the wrongs done by his colleagues — as in the last instance of the Simla municipality row — it covers him with a garment of undying glory spun out of the gratitude and affection for him of the people he so fearlessly defends. Both of you labour under the strange impression that we can, and even do care for anything that may be said or thought of us. Disabuse your minds, and remember that the first requisite in even a simple fakir, is that he should have trained himself to remain as indifferent to moral pain as to physical suffering. Nothing can give us personal pain or pleasure. And what I now say is, rather to bring you to understand us than yourselves which is the most difficult science to learn. That Mr. Hume's intention — prompted by a feeling as transient as it was hasty, and due to a sense of growing irritation against me whom he accused of a desire "to sit upon him" — was to revenge himself by an ironical, hence (to the European mind)