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What H.P.B. repeated to you is correct: "the natives do not see Bennett's coarseness and K.H. is also a native." What did I mean? Why — simply that our Buddha-like friend can see thro' the varnish, the grain of the wood beneath and inside the slimy, stinking oyster — the "priceless pearl within!" B---- is an honest man and of a sincere heart, besides being one of tremendous moral courage and a martyr to boot. Such our K.H. loves — whereas he would have only scorn for a Chesterfield and a Grandison. I suppose that the stooping of the finished "gentleman" K.H., to the coarse fibred infidel Bennett is no more surprising than the alleged stooping of the "gentleman" Jesus to the prostitute Magdalene: There's a moral smell as well as a physical one good friend. See how well K.H. read your character when he would not send the Lahore youth to talk with you without a change of dress. The sweet pulp of the orange is inside the skin — Sahib: try to look inside boxes for jewels and do not trust to those lying in the lid. I say again: the man is an honest man and a very earnest one; not


Notes: 

Chesterfield probably refers to Philip Dormer Stanhope, Fourth Earl of Chesterfield, English politician and writer best known for Letters to His Son (1774), which portrays the ideal 18th-century gentleman.

Grandison may be referring to the main character of the novel The History of Sir Charles Grandison by Samuel Richardson, first published in February 1753 "to give the world his (the author's) idea of a good man and fine gentleman combined."