To the end
of her days Toru was a better French than English scholar. She loved
France best, she knew its literature best, she wrote its language with
more perfect elegance. The Dutts arrived in Europe at the close of 1869,
and the girls went to school, for the first and last time, at a French
pension. They did not remain there very many months; their father took
them to Italy and England with him, and finally they attended for a
short time, but with great zeal and application, the lectures for women
at Cambridge. In November, 1873, they went back to Bengal, and the four
remaining years of Toru's life were spent in the old garden-house at
Calcutta, in a feverish dream of intellectual effort and imaginative
production. When we consider what she achieved in these forty-five
months of seclusion, it is impossible to wonder that the frail and
hectic body succumbed under so excessive a strain.
She brought with her from Europe a store of knowledge that would have
sufficed to make an English or French girl seem learned, but which in
her case was simply miraculous.
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