ply
sex-venom--the half-involuntary vengeance that the under-dog inflicts on
the other when positions are reversed. When India's women finally break
purdah and enter politics openly, we shall see more cruelty and
savagery, for that reason, than either the French or Russian terrors had
to show.

I was bruised and actually bleeding in a dozen places when they hustled
me down a corridor at last, and crowded me into a narrow anteroom, where
the two harridans who had handled me hardest had the worst of it. I gave
them what in elephant stables is known as the "squeeze," crushing them
to right and left against projecting walls; whereat they screamed, and I
heard the reproving voice of the Mahatma just behind me:

"Violence is the folly of beasts. Patience and strength are one!"

But they were not sticking pins into his ribs and thighs to humiliate
and discourage him. He was being led by either hand, and cooed to softly
in the sort of way that members of the Dorcas Guild would treat a
bishop. It was easy enough for him to feel magnanimous. I managed to
tread hard on one foot, and to squeeze two more women as they shoved me
through a door into a vast audience hall, and the half-suppressed
screams were music in my ears. I don't see why a woman who uses pins on
a prisoner should be any more immune than a man from violent
retaliation.

When they had shut the door they stripped the silk bag off over my head
and holding me by the arms, four on either side, dragged me to the
middle of a hall that was at least as large as Carnegie Hall in New
York, and two or three thousand times as sumptuous.

I stood on a strip of carpet six feet wide, facing a throne that faced
the door I had entered by. The throne was under a canopy, and formed the
center of a horseshoe ring of gilded chairs, on every one of which sat a
heavily veiled woman. Except that they were marvelously dressed in all
the colors of the rainbow and so heavily jeweled that they flashed like
the morning dew, there was nothing to identify any of the women except
one. She was Yasmini. And she sat on the throne in the center, unveiled,
unjeweled, and content to outshine all of them without any kind of
artificial aid.

She sat under a hard white light directed from behind a lattice in the
wall that would have exaggerated the slightest imperfection of looks or
manner; and she looked like a fairy-book queen--like the queen you used
to think of in the nursery when your aunt read