Pig'Sticking 13 



as so many contracts. English women who espouse 

 them in England as civilised men should not ignore 

 the fact that it is the rarest exception to meet with 

 a single unmarried Mohammedan in India, and that 

 complications have before now arisen when a native 

 ruler has returned with a European wife to the land 

 of his birth. That Kapurthalah should treat the 

 Ranee Canari as his companion is a welcome fact ; 

 and he told us that he should not allow his eldest 

 son and heir, Ticker, to marry till he was twenty 

 years old, and then to have but one wife. It is the 

 thin edge of civilisation. 



We were taken to call upon the Maharanee, 

 Ticker's mother, later on a little gipsy, childlike 

 individual of refined appearance, weighed down by 

 gold-embroidered garments, chains, necklets, bracelets, 

 rings, necklaces, forehead star, anklets, and nose-ring. 

 Compared with this daughter of the bluest blood 

 and of a thousand kings, Queen Victoria's own family 

 tree would be but as a thing of yesterday. 



Is it life which the Maharanee leads which all 

 Purdah women all over India lead ? In the white- 

 walled homes of kings, or in the reed-roofed hut, 

 lives woman after woman, thousands upon thousands 

 of them, surrounded by fields they may not roam 

 in, above the tumult of the packed bazaar, through 

 nameless horrors of the stifling night, old in grief, 

 and wise in tears, 



A life which ebbs with none to staunch the failing, 

 Love's sad harvest garnered in the spring. 



