husband by hastening to get ready for the funeral pyre to be burnt
alive with his corpse. And when, after expressing her joy at his
rescue and kissing him, she turns and sees Vasantasena, she exclaims:
"O this happiness! How do you do, my sister?" Vasantasena replies:
"Now I am happy," and the two embrace!

The translator of Cudraka's play notes in the preface that there is a
curious lack of ardor in the expression of Tscharudatta's love for
Vasantasena, and he naively--though quite in the Hindoo
spirit--explains this as showing that this superior person (who is a
model of altruistic self-sacrifice in every respect), "remains
untouched by coarse outbursts of sensual passion." The only time he
warms up is when he hears that the bayaderes prefers him to her
wealthy persecutor; he then exclaims, "Oh, how this girl deserves to
be worshipped like a goddess." Vasantasena is much the more ardent of
the two. It is she who goes forth to seek him, repeatedly, dressed in
purple and pearls, as custom prescribes to a girl who goes to meet her
lover. It is she who exclaims: "The clouds may rain, thunder, or send
forth lightning: women who go to meet their lovers heed neither heat
nor cold." And again: "may the clouds tower on high, may night come
on, may the rain fall in torrents, I heed them not. Alas, my heart
looks only toward the lover." It is she who is so absent-minded,
thinking of him, that her maid suspects her passion; she who, when a
royal suitor is suggested to her, exclaims, "'Tis love I crave to
bestow, not homage."

SYMPTOMS OF FEMININE LOVE

This portrayal of the girl as the chief lover is quite the custom in
Hindoo literature, and doubtless mirrors life as it was and is. Like a
dog that fawns on an indifferent or cruel master, these women of India
were sometimes attached to their selfish lovers and husbands. They had
been trained from their childhood to be sympathetic, altruistic,
devoted, self-sacrificing, and were thus much better prepared than the
men for the germs of amorous sentiment, which can grow only in such a
soil of self-denial. Hence it is that Hindoo love-poems are usually of
the feminine gender. This is notably the case with the _Saptacatakam_
of Hala, an anthology of seven hundred Prakrit verses made from a
countless number of love-poems that are intended to be sung--"songs,"
says Albrecht Weber, "such as the girls of India, especially perhaps
the bayaderes or temple girls may have been in the habi