"Cupid's Arrows" is a short story by Rudyard Kipling. It was first published in the first Indian edition of Plain Tales from the Hills in 1888, and in subsequent editions of that collection. This story is a Kiplingesque investigation - that is to say a strange combination of close observation, some mild satire of the strangeness of social conventions, and an acceptance of their strangeness, from the rather distant stance of an observer - of matters of love and marriage. It begins with "a very pretty girl, the daughter of a poor but honest District and Sessions Judge ... Her Mamma was very anxious about her daughter's future, as all good Mammas should be." There is also (at Simla) Barr-Saggott, a rich man of high status - a Commissioner, no less - but ugly. "When he turned his attentions to