Page:A child of the Orient (IA childoforient00vakarich).pdf/47

 which might have been less, had I not been a visitor to these Turkish households.

Yet curiously, too, as I grew older, I liked the Turks more and more, though in my liking there was a certain amount of protective feeling, such as one might feel for wayward children, rather than for equals.

I learned to see what was noble, charming, and poetical in their lives; but I also became conscious that in spite of the faults of my race, in spite of the limitations of our religion, our civilization was better than theirs, because it contained such words as discipline, duty, and obligation. And dimly I felt that we were a race that had come to the world to stay and to help, while theirs was perhaps some day to vanish utterly.