“If I sell this dish of meal I shall probably get ten farthings for it.  For that I can buy some of these pots, which I can sell again at a profit; thus my money will increase.  Then I shall begin to trade in betel-nuts, dress-goods and other things, and thus I may bring my wealth up to a hundred thousand.  With that I shall be able to marry four wives, and to the youngest and prettiest of them I shall give my tenderest love.  How the others will be tortured by jealousy!  But just let them dare to quarrel.  They shall know my wrath and feel my club!”

With these words he laid about him with his club, and of course broke his own dish besides many of the potter’s wares.  The potter hearing the crash, ran to see what was the matter, and the Brahman was ignominiously thrown out of the hall.

The polygamous imagination of the Hindoos runs riot in many of their stories.  To give another instance:  The Kathakoca, or Treasury of Stories (translated by C.H.  Tawney, 34), includes an account of the adventures of King Kanchanapura, who had five hundred wives; and of Sanatkumara who beheld eight daughters of Manavega and married them.  Shortly afterward he married a beautiful lady and her sister.  Then he conquered Vajravega and married one hundred maidens.

Hindoo books assure us that women, unless restrained, are no better than men.  We read in the same Hitopadesa that they are like cows—­always searching for new herbs in the meadows to graze on.  In polyandrous communities the women make good use of their opportunities.  Dalton, in his book on the wild tribes of Bengal, tells this quaint story (36): 

“A very pretty Dophla girl once came into the station of Luckimpur, threw herself at my feet and in most poetical language asked me to give her protection.  She was the daughter of a chief and was sought in marriage and promised to a peer of her father who had many other wives.  She would not submit to be one of many, and besides she loved and she eloped with her beloved.  This was interesting and romantic.  She was at the time in a very coarse travelling dress, but assured of protection she took fresh apparel and ornament from her basket and proceeded to array herself, and very pretty she looked as she combed and plaited her long hair and completed her toilette.  In the meantime I had sent for the ‘beloved,’ who had kept in the background, and alas! how the romance was dispelled when a dual appeared! She had eloped with two men!”

Every reader will laugh at this denouement, and that laugh is eloquent proof that in saying there can be no real love without absolute monopolism of one heart by another I simply formulated and emphasized a truth which we all feel instinctively.  Dalton’s tale also brings out very clearly the world-wide difference between a romantic love-story and a story of romantic love.

Turning from the Old World to the New we find stories illustrating the same amusing disregard of amorous monopolism.  Rink, in his book of Eskimo tales and traditions, cites a song which voices the reveries of a Greenland bachelor: