furniture was good and valuable, but, considering the part of the town that she lived in, among wealthy, fashionable, and half-educated Marwaris,[1] the wonder was that she was contented with so little. In this respect her house bore no resemblance to other houses that I had seen belonging to women of her profession. The impression one usually gets on entering such a house with its numerous candelabras and lamps, pictures, glass cases, and mirrors, is one of overloaded stuffiness and want of freedom: one is afraid even to breathe. The innumerable articles which admirers shower as presents, so fill the rooms that one is tempted to think that they, like their donors, have to jostle and elbow one another in order to keep their ground. But here I did not notice a single superfluous article of furniture; what I saw appeared to have been selected for the personal use of the owner of the house, and not to have been thrust in as a kind of intrusion, so to speak, of some one else's wanton desire overriding the taste and will of the owner. Another thing that attracted my notice was that there were no arrangements for singing or music in the house of Piari, the celebrated singing-girl of Patna. Wandering from one room to another, I came at last to the door of a room in one corner of the first floor. One glance at the interior was sufficient to show that this was her bedroom. But how different from what my imagination had pictured it to be! The floor was of white stone, and the walls shone white and fresh as milk. On one side of the room was a small cot behind which stood an iron safe; on the other side, a clothes-rack with a
- ↑ Marwaris: a mercantile community whose home is in Marwar, a part of Rajputana, but whose business ability has given them the control of a large part of the trade of Bengal.
163
