A Bengali landowner encourages his wife out of the women's quarters and into the world, and the world arrives in the person of his friend — a nationalist agitator who wants her jewellery for the cause and rather more besides. Tagore won the Nobel in 1913, the first non-European to do so, and returned his knighthood after Amritsar; this 1916 novel says out loud what the nationalist movement did not want said, and cost him friends for decades.