If she was not
like Rama, fair as the jasmine, or the moon, or the fibres of the lotos,
neither had she, like Krishna, the complexion of a cloud. If she was not
so delicate as that dainty beauty who bewitched the hard heart of
Surajah Dowlah, and weighed but sixty-four pounds, neither did she
reproduce the unwieldy charms of that Venus of one of the Shasters
"whose gait was the gait of a drunken elephant or a goose." A prudent
man, says the Vishnoo Pooran, will not marry a woman who has a beard, or
one who has thick ankles, or one who speaks with a shrill voice, or one
who croaks like a raven, or one whose eyebrows meet, or one whose teeth
resemble tusks. And Karlee was a prudent man.
From the extravagant and clumsy complications, the stupid caprices and
discords, and studious indecencies of our women's fashions, to the
prudent simplicity, the unconscious poetry and picturesqueness and
musically blended modesty and freedom of the good ayah's unchangeable
attire, my thought reverts with a mingled sense of refreshment and
regret. A single web of cloth, eight or nine yards long, having a narrow
blue border, was drawn in self-forming folds around her shoulders and
bosom, and hung down to her feet,--the material muslin, the texture
somewhat coarse, the color white.
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