They knew me well in the place,--you can imagine what it was--I often went there. Apart from anything else, it interested me. The girls were all Tamils and Sinhalese. It always reminded me somehow of the Arabian Nights; that room when you came into it so bare and empty, and then the sudden rush of laughter, the pale yellow naked women, the brilliant colours of the cloths, the the white teeth, all appearing so suddenly in the doorway up there at the end of the room. And the girls themselves interested me; I used to sit and talk to them for hours in their own language; they didn't as a rule understand English. They used to tell me all about themselves, queer pathetic stories often. They came from villages almost always, little native villages hidden far away among rice fields and coconut trees, and they had drifted somehow into this hovel in the warren of filth and smells which we and our civilization had attracted about us. Poor Reynolds, he was very uncomfortable at first. He didn't know what to do in the least or where to look. He stammered out yes and no to the few broken English sentences which the girls repeated like parrots to him. They soon got tired of kissing him and came over to me to tell me their little troubles and ask me for advice--all of them that is, except one. She was called Celestinahami and was astonishingly beautiful. Her skin was the palest of pale gold with a glow in it, very rare in the fair native women. The delicate innocent beauty of a child was in her face; and her eyes, Lord, her eyes immense, deep, dark and melancholy which looked as if they knew and understood and felt everything in the world. She never wore anything coloured, just a white cloth wrapped round her waist with one end thrown over the left shoulder. She carried about her an air of slowness and depth and mystery of silence and of innocence. She lay full length on the sofa with her chin on, her hands, looking up into Reynolds' face and smiling at him. The white cloth had slipped down and her breasts were bare. She was a Sinhalese, a cultivator's daughter, from a little village up in the hills: her place was in the green rice fields weeding, or in the little compound under the palm trees pounding rice, but she lay on the dirty sofa and asked Reynolds in her soft broken English whether he would have a drink. It began in him with pity. 'I saw the pity of it, Jessop,' he said to me afterwards, 'the pity of it.' He lost his shyness, he began to talk to her in his gentle cultivated voice; she didn't understand a word, but she looked up at him with her great innocent eyes and smiled at him. He even stroked her hand and her arm. She smiled at him still, and said her few soft clipped English sentences. He looked into her eyes that understood nothing but seemed to understand everything, and then it came out at last; the power to feel, the power that so few have, the flame, the passion, love, the real thing.