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to aim at. Old, mean? clothes are one thing (though when a man can dress in plain ones I cannot see why he should not), but dirtiness of body is another and I do not believe that where this can be avoided, it should be permitted. And in fact I am unable to believe that any adept can be really dirty or offensive. But even were this so, this would not in the smallest degree repel me, once I knew that it was really an adept I was dealing with and that as foul as the exterior husk might be, the true good seed was within. 



I am quite sure that if you are true and genuine, and I believe you to be, the kindly feelings that this correspondence has engendered toward you would be in no way weakened, but rather strengthened by personal intercourse with you. I hardly see people's outsides. I often know and care for people without hardly knowing what they are like in body. Men mostly think a great deal of women's looks - and I have been sometimes surprised when promising a woman to a man, at being told "look she may be very good but she is awfully plain" and then again on looking carefully at my lady friend to discover, tho I had never known it that she was awfully plain. So I am quite certain that nothing in your external personal appearance could in the smallest degree affect my sentiments. 



As for your dear dirty neophyte, I wish he had been sent to me, dirty pagri and all, and it would have gone hard with me, if while learning from him higher things, I had not been able to convert him to my views of the beauty and goodness of cleanliness.