legiance. Aye! would
she but open her arms to me again, I should forget everything else in
the three worlds, to snatch her in my own. How is it possible to hate
her? And beyond all doubt, that rascal I slew hit the mark, when he
said that Narasinha cannot quarrel with her, being utterly unable to
do without her, disarmed in all his attempts to oppose her by his own
conviction that she is absolutely indispensable to his own life. For
she may have deserved ten thousand deaths, and yet what does it
matter, if for all that she is a thing that once lost or destroyed can
never be replaced, as indeed she is, resembling the _Kaustubha_,[35]
or the third eye of the Moony-crested god, of which in the three
worlds there is only one. And so since he cannot do without her, she
is beyond all reach, and invulnerable, doing with impunity exactly
what she pleases, caring nothing whether he loves or hates her, and
laughing at the very notion of being brought to book, secure in the
magic circle of her own irresistible attraction, whose very power of
destroying all others is her own protection, like a spell with a
double edge, such that, as that rascal said, she cannot refrain from
amusing herself by trying its effect on all.

And who could find it in his heart to blame her for delighting in the
exercise of her own spell, like a child rejoicing in its toy, aye!
even were he himself its victim, as its effect would be the same, no
matter what she did, seeing that she must attract whether she will or
no? Being what she is, she cannot help it: it is involuntary and
beyond her control. And alas! I fell before it without a shadow of
resistance, enslaved even before I saw it by her own dream, not even
affording her the pleasure of watching her fascination gradually
overcoming opposition, and asserting its power, and subduing me to her
domination, against my will. And so I became a thing of no value to
her at all, since in my case there was nothing to overcome. Ah! had I
only been capable of seeming to be one on whom her charm would not
work, then indeed, as Haridasa says, I might have prevailed: and she
might herself have fallen victim to the man who defied her fascination
and laughed in her face, out of pique and irritation at her own
impotence. And all the more, if what that rascal said have any truth,
that she actually took a momentary fancy to me, strange as it seems.
But alas! as he said, it is all too late.

And suddenly I started to my f