"Mighty Buddh," she pleaded, "he is my sooeetart. I am just a little girl, and I love him. Please give him back to me, dear Buddh."
She looked up at him timidly, seeking assurance, but he did not smile back at her. She was going to say more, trying to make Buddh understand how extremely important it was, but just then Mama San knocked at the door and told her she must come down-stairs.
So Okimi dabbed on the rouge, and smoothed out her gay silken kimono, and took her samisen, and hurried down as fast as she could with her funny little toed-in steps.
Again the swaying lamps burned dim above us, and the priestess of Lal, all trembling, looked up at me with terror-haunted eyes.
"Poor little child," she whispered. "Poor little life-mocked child! That is the bitter fate which women fear, to be sucked dry of their fresh sweetness, of their life, and then be tossed aside. Oh, I have seen it many times. We give our all, and it is wasted because men--"
"Not all men," I said. "Not all men are like Okimi's warrior sweetheart."
"They are all alike," cried the priestess of Lal vehemently. "In their hearts they are all alike, lighter than air, unstabler than water, more fickle than nectar-seeking butterflies. They love our beauty, and when that is gone-- Look you," she cried. "This is the tragedy of a woman, to be beautiful, to be loved, and to grow old. Look," she said. "I will show you."
Once again the light of the silver lamps was quenched, and silent, side by side, the priestess of Lal and I looked far down the weary path which Eastern women travel not knowing where an end shall be.
In all the ride from Segovia along the beach, Hazlitt met only three living things, three women staring at him out of the folds of dingy calico which shielded their faces from the glare of sun and sea. One was young and very graceful; another was not so young, a comely, ox-like thing, laden with comfortable fat. The third was old and bent, with a hideously wrinkled, hopeless face, the mask of that impatient death which shrivels away the women of the hot Eastern world, outside and in. For a moment they startled him. They were like phantoms risen to confront him on the lifeless beach, for the youngest was but a memory of what the eldest had been a little time before, and the eldest only a prophecy of what the youngest soon would be. As they stood and watched him passing by, shifting their worn feet uneasily on the blistering sand, Hazlitt felt a mild stirring of pity at the familiar sight.
