Lidia

Martha Root felt she had been guided to Lidia. 'Baha'u'llah and 'Abdu'1-Baha have planned it', she wrote Ella Cooper. 'For months have been praying for this ... I feel that 'Abdu'1-Baha and Dr Zamenhof are wishing this closer coming together of the two movements.'

But when Martha spoke to Lidia about the religion, Dr Zamenhof s daughter was skeptical. 'Soon she told me what was the Cause to which she was sacrificing her life', Lidia later wrote. 'I can't say I accepted it at once. Too long was I indifferent to matters of faith. I remember asking her whether an atheist (myseljl) can be a Baha'i. And when she told me that the Baha'is do believe in the existence of God, I decided within myself: well, I am not going to be a Baha'i. But Martha could not be discouraged easily. She knew how to be patient, to be faithful - and to pray. It was her pure and spiritual personality which appealed to me at that time more than any written statements.'

Having grown up with the atmosphere of veneration that surrounded her father, Lidia was perhaps specially susceptible to a personality like Martha's, sincerely and wholly devoted to the life of the ideal. Martha also had, Marzieh Gail has recalled, 'an understated, matemal tenderness about her', which was probably comforting and alluring to Lidia, who had only recently lost her own mother. Martha and Lidia did form a deep, enduring bond of love that was as that between mother and daughter. Martha referred to Lidia in letters as her 'spiritual child' and Lidia thought of Martha as her 'spiritual mother', but to them the expression was more than simply a figure of speech.

Although, as Lidia has remarked, it was Martha's 'pure and spiritual personality' which attracted her at first, Martha's message, the Baha'i teachings, struck a chord in Lidia. She had grown up with, if not a personal belief, at least a family loyalty to her father's philosophv as the most advanced teachings on the subject of mankind as 'one great

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