Buddha. I am sure that if it were not for
their influence the laws against taking life and against intoxicants
would not be observed as stringently as they are. So far they will go.
As far as they can use the precepts of religion and retain their
home-life they will do so; as it was with Yathodaya so long ago, so it
is now. But when religion calls them and says, 'Come away from the
world, leave all that you love, all that your heart holds good, for it
is naught; see the light, and prepare your soul for peace,' they hold
back. This they cannot do; it is far beyond them. 'Thakin, we _cannot do
so_. It would seem to us terrible,' that is what they say.

A man who renounces the world is called 'the great glory,' but not so a
woman.

I have said that the Buddhist religion holds men and women as equal. If
women can observe its laws as men do, it is surely their own fault if
they be held the less worthy.

Women themselves admit this. They honour a man greatly who becomes a
monk, not so a nun. Nuns have but little consideration. And why? Because
what is good for a man is not good for a woman; and if, indeed,
renunciation of the world be the only path to the Great Peace, then
surely it must be true that women must be born again.

CHAPTER XVII

DIVORCE

'They are to each other as a burning poison falling into a man's
eye.'--_Burmese saying._

I remember a night not so long ago; it was in the hot weather, and I was
out in camp with my friend the police-officer. It was past sunset, and
the air beneath the trees was full of luminous gloom, though overhead a
flush still lingered on the cheek of the night. We were sitting in the
veranda of a Government rest-house, enjoying the first coolness of the
coming night, and talking in disjointed sentences of many things; and
there came up the steps of the house into the veranda a woman. She came
forward slowly, and then sat down on the floor beside my friend, and
began to speak. There was a lamp burning in an inner room, and a long
bar of light came through the door and lit her face. I could see she was
not good-looking, but that her eyes were full of tears, and her face
drawn with trouble. I recognised who she was, the wife of the
head-constable in charge of the guard near by, a woman I had noticed
once or twice in the guard.

She spoke so fast, so fast; the words fell over each other as they came
from her lips, for her heart was very full.

I sat quite still a