In the Central plateau, however, and the south of India the skirt is also dispensed with by a fashion that can claim at once antiquity and respectability. There it is the long mantle, twenty-five feet in length, which is worn. Of thick coarse silk and dark solid colour, it is so draped as to be caught between the legs in a broad, low-hanging fold, tucked loosely at the back. Its folds are carefully arranged to leave a double thickness, marked by the border of the mantle, over the upper part of the legs. It is a style inherited from a remote antiquity, descendant from the dresses seen even on Buddhist carvings in the great rock temples of the Deccan. Beautiful it can hardly be called, with its effect of a divided skirt and its too clumsy folds and thicknesses; but it is certainly not frivolous. Rather perhaps should one say that it is eminently respectable, with its sameness and stiff conventionality. The pressure of the ascetic ideal is shown even more strongly in the monotonous colours, dark blue usually or dark green, which are the ordinary wear in those parts of the country. To the artist the costume, one would think, had little value; yet that it can be idealized is seen from the effects achieved in the simplifications of early sculpture. This contrast in dress between the southern part of the Peninsula and Gujarát or Northern India reflects once again that contrast in belief and character which has already, perhaps with a too frequent repetition, been remarked. This monotony of asceticism is even more noticeable in the south in the dress of widows (poor creatures with shaven heads, their limbs untouched by a single jewel!)--a dress of a mantle only, white or of a strange dull, dingy red--a dress that kills all looks and attractions, save where the light of religious duty, nature overcome, makes the starved face seem spiritual. [Illustration: A WOMAN OF THE UNITED PROVINCES]