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THE MEMORIES of your charm and grace and intelligence come to me as I send this little decorative aside of ours to the press for a new edition. I recall how you brushed away my fears that the neo-Brahmins would laugh at this extravaganza. Apart from some of the formulas you and other women friends gave me from your cupboard, I had collected most of the beauty-aid prescriptions from the old Hindu and Buddhist texts, the authors of which, while prohibiting the use of oils and creams and potions, delighted in listing them in footnotes.

You had just then announced that you were giving up wearing the thick homespuns of the days when you used to go to jail in the freedom movement, and were going to put on saris of finer homespun silks and encourage your friends to do the same. I then gave you the manuscript to edit and to add to wherever you felt necessary and append your signature, in order to save me from the objections of our womenfolk to my knowledge of their secret lives. You agreed because, I think, you were one of the few Indian women who were beginning to react against the prejudices of the Aryan male against women. You had recognized Desire, linked it to memories of innocent expression in women; you possessed the desire for Desire, the conscious ness of yourself as a woman beyond slavery to man's wishes; and you sanctioned my confirmation of the "metonymy of desire," the autonomy of woman, the equal of man, but different. To the love of the ever-expanding freedom that you expressed · in your life and writings, I dedicate this book.

—MULK RAJ ANAND

Good looks, good qualities, youth, and grace are the chief and most natural means of making a person agreeable in the eyes of others. But in the absence of these a man or a woman should have resort to artificial means, to art.

—VATSYAYANA