Page:Broken Ties and Other Stories.pdf/180

 swift fingers she brushes away from her dress a mere nothing; standing on tiptoe she peeps over her terrace walls for no cause whatever, and then with a rapid motion turns round to go to another direction, swinging her bunch of keys tied to a corner of her garment. She loosens her hair in an untimely caprice, sitting before her mirror to do it up again, and then in a fit of laziness flings herself upon her bed like a line of stray moonlight, slipping through some opening of the leaves, idling in the shadow.

She has no children and, having been married into a wealthy family, has very little work to do. Thus she seems daily accumulating her own self without expenditure till the vessel is brimming over with the seething surplus. She has her husband, but not under her control. She has grown up from a girl into a woman, and yet through familiarity escaping her husband’s notice.

When she was newly married, and her husband, Gopinath, was attending his college, he would often play the truant and, under cover of the mid-day siesta of his elders, secretly come to make love to Giribala. Though they lived under the same roof he would create occasions to send her letters on tinted notepaper perfumed with rosewater, and