And yet, again, this contamination against which I am bound to guard myself is ceremonial not moral. It is not because you would teach me to swear or lie or thieve that I cannot dine at your table, but because drinking water at your hands, and eating what has been cooked at your fire, is within the canonical “Thou shalt not.” The odd thing is that until English education brought other ideas to the country, no one resented his place in life. “Why kick against the inevitable?” he would argue. “I shall come again; who knows but that in my next genesis I might not myself be sitting on that topmost step?” All is in a man’s own hands--he will reap hereafter, as he sows now this minute.... And Hindu women? How has caste affected them? We have seen that it was invented primarily for their benefit, for though a man might marry beneath him, no woman was allowed like liberty. The natural result of this arrangement was that there were too few men to go round in the higher castes; and in a scheme of life and after life which has no room or use for spinsters, the only resource was to marry them off as quickly as possible, whence, in the opinion of some, infant marriage, though the instinct of self-preservation against Mahommedan raids must have done something. Of course, no woman realizes this, and the reason she will give you for Baby marriages is that a Father’s class of Heaven depends on the age at which his daughter was married. If she is settled between three and five he goes to a first-class heaven, if between five and eight to a second class, eight and eleven to a third class--after that to hells, only to hells! For herself she is content with the most detailed and minute table of procedure, nor questions how it was made. She knows far better than any man the difference between +A and -A. She will tell you also quaint exceptions to the God-rules. “You may stand by So-and-so when she is cooking a dish of green (but not red) pulse, and never _never_ when she is cooking rice. It would all have to be thrown away, it and the vessels, even if the shadow of a shadow fell across it.” In South India I have heard tell of a caste of Brahmins so strict that no lower caste may come within thirty yards of its elect; and when the high-caste woman walks abroad, she has a fore-runner clearing the way before her face. Again, with some castes not only must you, being alien or of a lower caste, not touch their water or water vessels, but you must not enter the room which holds the drinking-water. If you do, the water is defiled. They have too good manners to tell you this. It may be their last drop of water in a drought, nevertheless, when you have gone away, the water is faithfully rejected. Nor, again, may they drink water even at the hands of the elect if the alien or outer-brother is in the room.