“If you don’t mind, I’ll try sitting on the floor, too,” Dicky told the latter. “I’d feel perched with Mr. Gandhi sitting below.” The Mahatma smiled. “I quite appreciate,” he said. “I hope you will find in India the same kindness that you gave Nagarjuna in New York.” Dicky had expected power; he found composure. His idea of power was perhaps in part a hang-over from a boyish ideal of a certain American financial executive. Nothing of that in this room; rather he was conscious of Gandhi’s frailness and smallness. This presence called forth impulses to be tender, to lower one’s voice, to hurry to bring anything wanted. He was shocked a little at the twisted, battered look of the features. The lips looked pulpy in parts and did not rest together evenly. The smile was curiously slow--tentative, like one in whom understanding dawns. Back of the iron-rimmed spectacles and tired eyes, so inured to pain, was the essence of fearlessness. This was the first commanding characteristic to the American. * * * * * “... Fear,” Gandhi was saying, “fear of death makes us devoid both of valor and religion. There is no place for fear in the _Satyagrahi’s_ heart.” “What is a _Satyagrahi_?” Cobden asked. “One who is devoted and pledged to truth, to _Satyagraha_. I coined the word, to express our purpose in South Africa. _Satyagraha_ is the use of Love-force or Soul-force.” Curiously, Dicky felt the cleanness of the house, the peace of it, the humming of a _charka_ in the next room, a symbol of that peace. He felt Gandhi’s face growing upon him out of the shadow, a face that had been dried cleanly by many suns, the features fashioned by a life of direct, unpredatory thinking--the face of a man incapable, even in thought, of hitting below the belt. And now, there was to go with the hum of the _charka_, the faint fragrance of dried fruit in the air, or that sweetness one breathes in the altitudes where the sun is shining upon the great conifers. “The world has talked much of the omnipotence of God,” Mahatma-ji went on. “India, at last, is preparing to put her faith to test. Passive resistance has been called the weapon of the weak; if this is so, the Soul is weaker than the flesh. Passive resistance calls upon its devotees to endure great suffering, even martyrdom and death. Those who believe it is too difficult to carry out do not trust the Soul. They are not moved by true courage.” There was no pose nor show, no straining for force, rarely an adjective or simile, no shadings of sense--a direct approach, inevitably direct. Dicky felt suddenly hopeless of ever understanding such directness. For the first time in his life, he realized that all his training to live and to write was less than straight. He had been taught half-tones, shadows to accentuate lights. Here was directness.