In the meantime, it became dawn; the princess concealed him; and when night returned they again engaged in the same innocent pleasures. Thus day after day sped rapidly by. Imagine, if you can, the youth’s felicity; he was of an ardent temperament, deeply enamoured, barely a score of years old, and he had been strictly brought up by serious parents. He therefore resigned himself entirely to the siren for whom he willingly forgot the world, and he wondered at his good fortune, which had thrown in his way a conquest richer than all the mines of Meru.[65] He could not sufficiently admire his Padmavati’s grace, beauty, bright wit, and numberless accomplishments. Every morning, for vanity’s sake, he learned from her a little useless knowledge in verse as well as prose, for instance, the saying of the poet-- Enjoy the present hour, ‘tis thine; be this, O man, thy law; Who e’er resew the yester? Who the morrow e’er foresaw? And this highly philosophical axiom-- Eat, drink, and love--the rest’s not worth a fillip. “By means of which he hoped, Raja Vikram!” said the demon, not heeding his royal carrier’s “ughs” and “poohs,” “to become in course of time almost as clever as his mistress.” Padmavati, being, as you have seen, a maiden of superior mind, was naturally more smitten by her lover’s dulness than by any other of his qualities; she adored it, it was such a contrast to herself.[66] At first she did what many clever women do--she invested him with the brightness of her own imagination. Still water, she pondered, runs deep; certainly under this disguise must lurk a brilliant fancy, a penetrating but a mature and ready judgment--are they not written by nature’s hand on that broad high brow? With such lovely mustachios can he be aught but generous, noble-minded, magnanimous? Can such eyes belong to any but a hero? And she fed the delusion. She would smile upon him with intense fondness, when, after wasting hours over a few lines of poetry, he would misplace all the adjectives and barbarously entreat the metre. She laughed with gratification, when, excited by the bright sayings that fell from her lips, the youth put forth some platitude, dim as the lamp in the expiring fire-fly. When he slipped in grammar she saw malice under it, when he retailed a borrowed jest she called it a good one, and when he used--as princes sometimes will--bad language, she discovered in it a charming simplicity.