Page:Between the twilights being studies of Indian women by one of themselves (IA betweentwilights00soraiala).pdf/144

124 your price. True, but not always. In the highest scheme of punishment, whether for man or woman, some one else pays. The Gods strike at the thing you love best. If the Gods are angry with a woman they take away her husband. Is not the very treatment of the widow in India recognition of the fact, and does she not so accept it?

But to return to the husband’s respect for his wife, that is a good thing to record. Say it is only policy; “where women are honoured, there the Gods are pleased; but where they are not honoured, no sacred rite yields reward.” … Say it is grounded in the fact of her being his possession; possibly, but at any rate it is there. How pre-eminently he regards her as his property there is proof upon proof. He leaves to no other hand punishment for encroachments; he shuts her away, lest eyes of others who do not own her should see and covet—it takes more than one generation to kill the anger in the eye of a man at a glance of admiration from another, honest though it be; and when he dies she remains his property still, that is the reason of perpetual widowhood; and till it was forbidden did she not,