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The Lost Jewels

her opposition without bending it to his own purpose. When Mani set her face hard, and said nothing, he was deeply hurt, yet he was incapable of returning the hurt back to her. The reason was that he had not even a trace of that barbarity which is the gift of the male. If any one had upbraided him for this, then most probably he would have expressed some such subtle sentiment as the following: “If my wife, of her own free choice, is unwilling to trust me with her jewelry, then I have no right to take them from her by force.”

‘Has God given to man such forcefulness only for him to spend his time in delicate measurement of fine-spun ideals?

‘However this may be, Bhusan, being too proud to touch his wife’s jewels, went to Calcutta to try some other way of raising the money.

‘As a general rule in this world, the wife knows the husband far better than the husband ever knows the wife; but extremely modern men in their subtlety of nature are altogether beyond the range of those unsophisticated instincts which womankind has acquired through ages. These men are a new race, and have become as mysterious as women themselves. Ordinary men can be divided roughly into three main classes; some of