tta I was told that there were two little widows, one
five years old and one six.

Formerly and up to the time that the British Government stopped the
practice less than a century ago, it was regarded as the widow's duty
to burn herself alive on her husband's funeral pyre. "It is proper for
a woman after her husband's death," said the old Code of Hindu Laws,
"to burn herself in the fire with his corpse. Every woman who thus
burns herself shall remain in Paradise with her husband 35,000,000
years by destiny. If she cannot burn, she must in that case preserve
an inviolable chastity." This rite of self-immolation was known as
suttee, and it is said that in Bengal alone a century ago the suttees
numbered one hundred a month. It was an old custom to set up a stone
with carved figures of a man and a woman to mark the spot where a
widow had performed suttee, and travellers to-day still find these
gruesome and barbaric memorials here and there along the Indian
roadsides. {244} Moreover, the present general treatment of widows in
India is so heartbreakingly cruel that many have been known to declare
that they would prefer the suttee.

And yet we may be sure that the picture is not wholly dark; that a
kind providence mingles some sunshine with the shadows which blacken
the skies of Indian womanhood. Men are often better than their customs
and sometimes better than their religions. The high-caste Hindu and
Mohammedan women who are supposed to keep their faces veiled and (in
the case of the Hindus at least) must not even look out of the windows
of their zenanas, manage to get a little more freedom than the strict
letter of the law allows; and the Hindu father and husband, doing good
by stealth, sometimes pours out in secret an affection for his
womenfolk which it would not be seemly for the world to know about.
Standing with a friend of mine on a high flat housetop in Calcutta one
day, I saw a Hindu father on the next-door housetop proudly and
lovingly walking and talking with his daughter who was just budding
into maidenhood. "His affection is quite unmistakable," my friend said
to me, "and yet if in public, he would never give any sign of it."

Nor can the lot of the Indian woman ever be regarded as hopeless while
the country holds the peerless Taj Mahal, the most beautiful monument
ever erected in memory of a woman's love. True, Shah Jehan, the
monarch who built it, was not a Hindu: he was a Mohammedan. And yet
Mohammedanism,