CHAPTER I.
On the Manner of Living of a Virtuous Woman, and of
Her Behavior During the Abesence of Her Husband
A virtuous woman, who has affection for her husband, should act in conformity with his wishes as if he were a divine being, and with his consent should take upon herself the whole care of his family. She should keep the whole house well cleaned, and arrange flowers of various kinds in different parts of it, and make the floor smooth and polished so as to give the whole a neat and becoming appearance. She should surround the house with a garden, and place ready in it all the materials required for the morning, noon, and evening sacrifices. Moreover she should herself revere the sanctuary of the Household Gods, for says Gonardiya, “nothing so much attracts the heart of an householder to his wife as a careful observance of the things mentioned above.”
Towards the parents, relations, friends, sisters, and servants of her husband she should behave as they deserve. In the garden she should plant beds of green vegetables, bunches of the sugar cane, and clumps of the fig tree, the mustard plant, the parsley plant, the fennel plant, and the xanthochymus pictorius. Clusters of various flowers such as the trapa bispinosa, the jasmine, the gasminum grandiflorum, the yellow amaranth, the wild jasmine, the tabernamontana coronaria, the nadyaworta, the china rose and others, should likewise be planted, together with the fragrant grass andropogon, schasnanthus, and the fragrant root of the plant andropogon miricatus. She should also have seats and arbors made in the garden, in the middle of which a well, tank, or pool should be dug.
The wife should always avoid the company of female beggars, female buddhist mendicants, unchaste and rougish women, female fortune tellers and witches. As regards meals she should always consider what her husband likes and dislikes, and what things are good for him, and what are injurious to him When she hears the sounds of his footsteps coming home she should at once get up, and be ready to do whatever he may command her, and either order her female servant to wash his feet, or wash them herself. When going
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