Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Ill H Ston? without an And then, Maheshwara tossed the last leaf into the air. And as it floated away down the stream, he said to the goddess, as she listened with attention: And yet he never came, as I told thee at the beginning. For Narasinha was beforehand with him, after all. And the Daughter of the Snow sat silent, looking away down the river after the floating leaf, until it was lost to sight. And then she said slowly: Why didst thou say in the beginning that Tarawali was the most extraordinary of all women, past, present, or to come? For I was deceived by thy encomium, expecting a woman altogether different from her, who was only but a specimen of her sex. And the Moony-crested god burst into loud laughter. And he exclaimed: Speak low, O Snowy One: for if thy mortal sisters overheard thee betraying their secrets and their cause, they would be very angry, and perhaps begin to curse thee as a traitor, instead of offering thee worship, as they all do now. What! dost thou actually deem her to be but a type of all the rest? Surely, thou must have been asleep all the time that I was reading, after all: since thou hast either misunderstood her altogether or, it may be, wilt not do her justice, out of jealousy: since no woman in the three worlds can ever be trusted to judge another fairly, treating her always as a criminal and a rival, and falling on her tooth and nail, especially if, like Tarawali, she sets custom at defiance, going by an independent standard of her own. But now let me help thee to see how utterly mistaken is thy estimate of a character so rare as hardly to be matched in the whole of space and time for her cleverness and her candour and her tranquillity of soul, leaving her beauty out of the account, as that one element in her common to a very host of...