Faith Quote by Mary Garden

The line lands with the quiet candor of someone admitting how porous identity can be when you are searching. Mary Garden sketches herself at the exact moment when curiosity starts flirting with surrender: a "new devotee" who can already see how a slightly different week, a slightly different hunger, could have ended in full-blown allegiance. That "could well have done" is the tell. It refuses the comforting myth that only fools get swept up; the speaker presents susceptibility as ordinary, almost logical.

The subtext is a balancing act between self-awareness and self-protection. "They seemed a bit extreme" functions less as moral judgment than as a socially legible exit ramp, a phrase you can say to reassure both yourself and your audience that you remained rational. Yet she immediately undercuts that distance: "I regarded myself as not quite ready". Not "they went too far", but "I haven't arrived yet". The extremity becomes a timeline problem, not a values problem. It's a subtle confession that the group wasn't alien; it was simply ahead.

Context matters. For a Western artist-intellectual cohort in the early 20th century, "Eastern mysticism" often signaled both genuine spiritual interest and fashionable revolt against Victorian certainties. Garden's phrasing captures that cultural crosscurrent: the allure of transcendence packaged as community, discipline, and purpose. The sentence is short, almost conversational, but it exposes a deeper truth about modern seeking: the boundary between exploring and belonging is thinner than we like to admit.