of joy from the dungeon of despair! For had this our
reunion been sooner by only a single day, I should have caught thy heart
before it had been occupied by this all too fortunate other woman, who
now holds it like a fortress, garrisoned by a prior claim. But what is
this priority of claim? Can she, who by thy own confession has known
thee only a single day, dare to dispute priority with the darling of thy
former birth[15]? Wilt thou break thy faith with me, to keep thy faith
with her? Aye! and wilt thou, after all, gain so much by the exchange?
Is she beautiful, then, this other woman? But I am beautiful, too? And
she stood up, and looked at Aja with her head thrown back and proud
eyes, as though to challenge his condemnation of her own consummate
beauty. And she said again: Is she, then, this other beauty, either
more faithful or more beautiful than I am? Speak, and tell me if thou
canst, in what I am inferior, or why I am to be despised, in comparison
with her.

[15] Though, in Europe, this insidious appeal might lack
force, it is otherwise in India: whose millions doubt their
former birth no more than they doubt their own existence.
It is not long since a woman in Cutch burned herself with
her own dead son, because, she averred, he had been her
husband in her former birth.

And Aja looked at her again, and felt abashed, and half ashamed, he knew
not why. And he murmured to himself: She does not lie: for beautiful she
is indeed, and need not fear comparison with any woman in the world. And
it may be, she is partly right, and if I had met her yesterday, before
my heart was full, she would have had little difficulty in entering in
and capturing it, almost without resistance. And he stood looking at her
silently, uncertain what to say or do, and half inclined to pity her,
and half afraid of her and of himself, admiring her against his will,
and as it were confessing by his very silence the power of her appeal.
For notwithstanding the preoccupation of his heart, his youth and his
sex became as it were allies with her against his resolution, compelling
him to acknowledge the supremacy of the cunning god, and the spell of
feminine attraction incarnate in her form.

And she stood there before him, for a little, with beauty as it were
heightened by resentful reproach of the slighting of itself, and the
disregard of its tried affection. And then all at once she sank down
upon the ground, as if she were ti