The Other Side of the Wall

Sara is fond of the Indian gentleman in the way she is fond of the Large Family — through observation, from a distance, by imagining the life behind the windows. She has developed, she tells Ermengarde, the habit of adopting people she never speaks to. You can feel quite close to someone, she explains, just by watching them and thinking about them and being sorry for things.

The kitchen servants know more than Sara. They know the Indian gentleman is not really Indian — he is an Englishman who lived in India. They know he came very close to losing everything in a business connected with mines. They know that the fortune was restored after all, but too late to stop the illness that has left him shattered. Sara, listening, works out the parallel: he felt what her father felt. He was ill as her father was ill. He did not die.

She begins to think of him differently — not only as a figure to observe but as a person who would understand certain things if she could speak to him. She imagines him on the other side of the wall between his study and the school's classroom. She does not know what he is thinking about. He is thinking, at this moment, about the missing daughter of a dead friend whose name she would recognize.