CHAPTER X.
PREPARATION AFTER CONSULTATION.
In the evening of the day following that on which Abhiram Swami drove out Bimala, she was making her toilet in her chamber. A woman of five and thirty, and engaged in that sort of thing? And why not so? Does youth pass away with any particular age? Never. Youth only passes away with beauty and love: she that has no beauty, is old in the very flower of youth; she who has it, is blessed with a perpetual youth; she whose mind is unknown to love and joy, is never young; she who has experienced them, never old. To that day, Bimala's body seemed filled with genial humors, and her mind overflowed with love and the ideas and desires which love inspires. Moreover, advance of age serves but to mellow beauty—a remark the truth of which the reader will be all the readier to allow, if he happen to be a little advanced in age.
What man that saw the beauty of her cherry-ripe lips, crimsoned with the color of the betel,[1] could say that he did not look upon a youthful lady? Who, after seeing the quick side-glances of her expansive eyes, shaded with kajjala,[2] could say that the woman was not younger than a damsel of twenty-five? What a lovely pair of eyes! So gracefully drawn out, so lustrous, so quick-glancing! The eyes of some women unmistakably show that they are ambitious, and that they are ever eager to
