A Mine of Faults

35

This is substantially a quotation from Manu: only it is not the Guru, but the Guru's wife, whom the pupil is there forbidden to approach. The princess plays upon the sex.

36

In the swayamwara ceremony, the mark of selection was the placing of a garland around the successful wooer's neck, by the hands of the bride herself.

37

A species of Arisæma, which we call "cobra-lily," and the natives, snake-root. Though there are many flowers intrinsically more beautiful, I do not know one more quaintly original, than this: shooting up, in dark wet woods, by roots of trees, old walls, or among dead leaves, pure and white and lonely and strangely suggestive of some wild individuality, silently symbolical of old sweet stories of Naiads and Dryads and Russian Rusalkas and Heine Loreleis.

38

(Pronounce yuga and kalpa as monosyllables, to rhyme with fugue and pulp.) A yuga is, as we should say, a geological Age: a kalpa, a whole series of such ages.

39

The upahára sandhi, or alliance produced by a gift from one of the contracting parties, is, according to Wishnusharma, of the fourteen different kinds of alliance, the best. I have selected Cordial Understanding as its nearest equivalent.

40

Abhimánika is a piece of profound psychology, utterly beyond translation. It means the intense self-gratification, or egoistic pride felt by either lover, conscious of monopolising the other's love, in being that other's adequate and reciprocal opposite and satisfaction: the strange and sweet emotion, half bashful, half triumphant; that seethes and bubbles in a young man's soul, when first a woman falls in love with him.