“Making one hundred exactly.”

Technically, Yasmini was as much maharanee of Sialpore as she would ever be, the moment that the fourteen-gun salute boomed out across the river.  For the English do not recognize a maharanee, except as courtesy title.  The reigning prince is maharajah, and, being Hindu, can have one wife or as many as he pleases.  Utirupa and Yasmini claimed to have married themselves by Gandharva rite, and, had she chosen, she could have gone to live with him that minute.

But that would not have paid her in the long run.  The priests, for instance, whom she despised with all her character, would have been outraged into life-long enmity; and she knew their power.

“It is one thing,” she told Tess, “to determine to be rid of cobras; but another to spurn them with your hand and foot.  They bite!”

Then again, it would not have suited her to slip quietly into Utirupa’s palace and assume the reins of hidden influence without the English knowing it.  She proposed taking uttermost advantage of the purdah custom that protects women in India from observation and makes contact between them and the English almost impossible.  But she intended, too, to force the Indian Government into some form of recognition of her.

“If they acknowledge me, they lock swords with every woman in the country.  Let them deny me afterward, and all those swords will quiver at their throats!  A woman’s sword is subtler than a man’s.”

(That was the secret of her true strength in all the years that followed.  It was never possible to bring her quite to bay, because the women pulled hidden strings for her in the sphere that is above and below the reach of governments.) So she moved back into her own palace, where she received only Tess of all the Anglo-Saxon women in India.

“Why don’t you keep open house to English women, and start something?” Tess asked her.  But Yasmini laughed.

“My power would be gone.  Do you fight a tiger by going down on all-fours with him and using teeth and claws?  Or do you keep your distance, and use a gun?”

“But the English women are not tigresses.”

“If they were, I would laugh at them.  Trapping tigers is a task the jungle coolies can attend to well!  But if I admit the English women into my palace, they will come out of curiosity.  And out of pity, or compassion or some such odious emotion they will invite me to their homes, making an exhibition of me to their friends.  Should I be one of them?  Never!  Would they admit other Indian women with me?  Certainly; any one I cared to recommend.  They would encourage us to try to become their social equals, as they would call it, always backing away in front of us and beckoning, we striving, and they flattered.  No!  I will reverse that.  I will have the English women striving to enter our society!  They shall wake up one day to discover there is something worth having