s inevitably, like grass. And this
opinion was justified by the conduct of the women themselves. For every
woman that set eyes on him, no matter who she was, fell instantly, like
a stone dropped into a well without a bottom, into the abyss of
infatuation, and utterly forgot not only her relations and her home,
but her honour and herself and everything in the three worlds, seized as
it were by the very frenzy of devotion, and anxious only to immolate
herself as a victim on the altar of his divinity. And strange! though he
treated them all as more worthless than grass, throwing them away almost
in the instant that he saw them, not one of them all ever took warning
by the fate of her predecessors: and so far were they from shunning him
as the common enemy of their entire sex, that on the contrary, they
seemed to struggle with one another for the prize of his momentary
affection, the more, the more openly he derided them; as if even his
derision and the cheapness in which he openly held them, increased the
power of his charm. Ha! very wonderful is the contradiction in the heart
of a woman, and bitter the irony of the Creator that fashioned it out of
so curious an antagonism! For she flies to the man who makes light of
her, as if pulled by a cord; while she utterly despises the man who
thinks himself nothing in comparison with her: saying as it were, by her
own behaviour, that she is absolutely worthless in her own esteem.

[Footnote 19: _Yoga._ The germ of truth, and it is a large one, in the
philosophy of _Yoga_ is the doctrine, which is proved by all experience,
that _concentration_ is the secret of mastery.]

IV

So then, after a while, the heart of King Jaya broke within him. For he
became odious in the eyes of all his subjects by reason of the behaviour
of his son, who paid no more regard to his admonitions than a mad
elephant does to a rope of grass. And he died, consumed by the two fires
of a burning fever and a devouring grief: and his wife followed him
through the flames of yet another fire, as if to say: I will die no
other death than his own.

And when the funeral obsequies had been completed, there came a day,
soon after, when Atirupa was sitting in his palace, with some of his
attendants round him, gazing at his own image, that was reflected in a
tiny mirror set on his finger in a ring. And he was plunged in the
contemplation of himself, shadowed by a melancholy that arose, not from
grief at the loss of h