But men
struggle vainly in the meshes of their destiny. The unbelieved
Cassandra was right after all; the plague came, and the necessity
of avoiding the quarantine, to which I should have been subjected
if I had sailed from Alexandria, forced me to alter my route. I
went down into Egypt, and stayed there for a time, and then crossed
the desert once more, and came back to the mountains of the
Lebanon, exactly as the prophetess had foretold.
Lady Hester talked to me long and earnestly on the subject of
religion, announcing that the Messiah was yet to come. She strived
to impress me with the vanity and the falseness of all European
creeds, as well as with a sense of her own spiritual greatness:
throughout her conversation upon these high topics she carefully
insinuated, without actually asserting, her heavenly rank.
Amongst other much more marvellous powers, the lady claimed to have
one which most women, I fancy, possess namely, that of reading
men's characters in their faces. She examined the line of my
features very attentively, and told me the result, which, however,
I mean to keep hidden.
One favoured subject of discourse was that of "race," upon which
she was very diffuse, and yet rather mysterious.
