foresters, all over the country, as well as those in the towns, and
everywhere there was the same high level of intelligence. Some knew far
more than others about one thing--they were specialized, of course; but
all of them knew more about everything--that is, about everything the
country was acquainted with--than is the case with us.

We boast a good deal of our “high level of general intelligence” and our
“compulsory public education,” but in proportion to their opportunities
they were far better educated than our people.

With what we told them, from what sketches and models we were able to
prepare, they constructed a sort of working outline to fill in as they
learned more.

A big globe was made, and our uncertain maps, helped out by those in
that precious yearbook thing I had, were tentatively indicated upon it.

They sat in eager groups, masses of them who came for the purpose, and
listened while Jeff roughly ran over the geologic history of the earth,
and showed them their own land in relation to the others. Out of that
same pocket reference book of mine came facts and figures which were
seized upon and placed in right relation with unerring acumen.

Even Terry grew interested in this work. “If we can keep this up,
they’ll be having us lecture to all the girls’ schools and colleges--how
about that?” he suggested to us. “Don’t know as I’d object to being an
Authority to such audiences.”

They did, in fact, urge us to give public lectures later, but not to the
hearers or with the purpose we expected.

What they were doing with us was like--like--well, say like Napoleon
extracting military information from a few illiterate peasants. They
knew just what to ask, and just what use to make of it; they had
mechanical appliances for disseminating information almost equal to ours
at home; and by the time we were led forth to lecture, our audiences
had thoroughly mastered a well-arranged digest of all we had previously
given to our teachers, and were prepared with such notes and questions
as might have intimidated a university professor.

They were not audiences of girls, either. It was some time before we
were allowed to meet the young women.

“Do you mind telling what you intend to do with us?” Terry burst
forth one day, facing the calm and friendly Moadine with that funny
half-blustering air of his. At first he used to storm and flourish quite
a good deal, but nothing seemed to amuse them more; they would gather
around and watch him as if it was an exhibition, politely, but with
evident interest. So he learned to check himself, and was almost
reasonable in his bearing--but not quite.

She announced smoothly and evenly: “Not in the least. I thought it was
quite plain. We are trying to learn of you all we can, and to teach you
what you are willing to learn of our country.”

“Is that all?” he insisted.

She smiled a quiet enigmatic smile. “That depends.”

“Depends on what?”

“Mainly on yourselves,” she replied.

“Why do you keep us shut up so closely?”

“Because we do not feel quite safe in allowing you at large where there
are so many young women.”

Terry was really pleased at that. He had thought as much, inwardly; but
he pushed the question. “Why should you be afraid? We are gentlemen.”

She smiled that little smile again, and asked: “Are ‘gentlemen’ always
safe?”

“You surely do not think that any of us,” he said it with a good deal of
emphasis on the “us,” “would hurt your young girls?”

“Oh no,” she said quickly, in real surprise. “The danger is quite the
other way. They might hurt you. If, by any accident, you did harm any
one of us, you would have to face a million mothers.”

He looked so amazed and outraged that Jeff and I laughed outright, but
she went on gently.

“I do not think you quite understand yet. You are but men, three men,
in a country where the whole population are mothers--or are going to be.
Motherhood means to us something which I cannot yet discover in any
of the countries of which you tell us. You have spoken”--she turned to
Jeff, “of Human Brotherhood as a great idea among you, but even that I
judge is far from a practical expression?”

Jeff nodded rather sadly. “Very far--” he said.

“Here we have Human Motherhood--in full working use,” she went on.
“Nothing else except the literal sisterhood of our origin, and the far
higher and deeper union of our social growth.

“The children in this country are the one center and focus of all our
thoughts. Every step of our advance is always considered in its effect
on them--on the race. You see, we are _Mothers_,” she repeated, as if
in that she had said it all.

“I don’t see how that fact--which is shared by all women--constitutes
any risk to us,” Terry persisted. “You mean they would defend their
children from attack. Of course. Any mothers would. But we are not
savages, my dear lady; we are not going to hurt any mother’s child.”

They looked at one another and shook their heads a little, but
Zava turned to Jeff and urged him to make us see--said he seemed to
understand more fully than we did. And he tried.

I can see it now, or at least much more of it, but it has taken me a
long time, and a good deal of honest intellectual effort.

What they call Motherhood was like this:

They began with a really high degree of social development, something
like that of Ancient Egypt or Greece. Then they suffered the loss of
everything masculine, and supposed at first that all human power and
safety had gone too. Then they developed this virgin birth capacity.
Then, since the prosperity of their children depended on it, the fullest
and subtlest coordination began to be practiced.

I remember how long Terry balked at the evident unanimity of these
women--the most conspicuous feature of their whole culture. “It’s
impossible!” he would insist. “Women cannot cooperate--it’s against
nature.”

When we urged the obvious facts he would say: “Fiddlesticks!” or “Hang
your facts--I tell you it can’t be done!” And we never succeeded in
shutting him up till Jeff dragged in the hymenoptera.

“‘Go to the ant, thou sluggard’--and learn something,” he said
triumphantly. “Don’t they cooperate pretty well? You can’t beat it. This
place is just like an enormous anthill--you know an anthill is nothing
but a nursery. And how about bees? Don’t they manage to cooperate and
love one another?

    As the birds do love the Spring,
    Or the bees their careful king,

as that precious Constable had it. Just show me a combination of male
creatures, bird, bug, or beast, that works as well, will you? Or one of
our masculine countries where the people work together as well as they
do here! I tell you, women are the natural cooperators, not men!”

Terry had to learn a good many things he did not want to. To go back to
my little analysis of what happened:

They developed all this close inter-service in the interests of their
children. To do the best work they had to specialize, of course; the
children needed spinners and weavers, farmers and gardeners, carpenters
and masons, as well as mothers.

Then came the filling up of the place. When a population multiplies
by five every thirty years it soon reaches the limits of a country,
especially a small one like this. They very soon eliminated all the
grazing cattle--sheep were the last to go, I believe. Also, they worked
out a system of intensive agriculture surpassing anything I ever heard
of, with the very forests all reset with fruit- or nut-bearing trees.

Do what they would, however, there soon came a time when they were
confronted with the problem of “the pressure of population” in an acute
form. There was really crowding, and with it, unavoidably, a decline in
standards.

And how did those women meet it?

Not by a “struggle for existence” which would result in an everlasting
writhing mass of underbred people trying to get ahead of one
another--some few on top, temporarily, many constantly crushed out
underneath, a hopeless substratum of paupers and degenerates, and no
serenity or peace for anyone, no possibility for really noble qualities
among the people at large.

Neither did they start off on predatory excursions to get more land from
somebody else, or to get more food from somebody else, to maintain their
struggling mass.

Not at all. They sat down in council together and thought it out. Very
clear, strong thinkers they were. They said: “With our best endeavors
this country will support about so many people, with the standard of
peace, comfort, health, beauty, and progress we demand. Very well. That
is all the people we will make.”

There you have it. You see, they were Mothers, not in our sense of
helpless involuntary fecundity, forced to fill and overfill the land,
every land, and then see their children suffer, sin, and die, fighting
horribly with one another; but in the sense of Conscious Makers
of People. Mother-love with them was not a brute passion, a mere
“instinct,” a wholly personal feeling; it was--a religion.

It included that limitless feeling of sisterhood, that wide unity in
service, which was so difficult for us to grasp. And it was National,
Racial, Human--oh, I don’t know how to say it.

We are used to seeing what we call “a mother” completely wrapped up in
her own pink bundle of fascinating babyhood, and taking but the faintest
theoretic interest in anybody else’s bundle, to say nothing of the
common needs of _all_ the bundles. But these women were working all
together at the grandest of tasks--they were Making People--and they
made them well.

There followed a period of “negative eugenics” which must have been an
appalling sacrifice. We are commonly willing to “lay down our lives” for
our country, but they had to forego motherhood for their country--and it
was precisely the hardest thing for them to do.

When I got this far in my reading I went to Somel for more light. We
were as friendly by that time as I had ever been in my life with any
woman. A mighty comfortable soul she was, giving one the nice smooth
mother-feeling a man likes in a woman, and yet giving also the clear
intelligence and dependableness I used to assume to be masculine
qualities. We had talked volumes already.

“See here,” said I. “Here was this dreadful period when they got far too
thick, and decided to limit the population. We have a lot of talk about
that among us, but your position is so different that I’d like to know a
little more about it.

“I understand that you make Motherhood the highest social service--a
sacrament, really; that it is only undertaken once, by the majority of
the population; that those held unfit are not allowed even that; and
that to be encouraged to bear more than one child is the very highest
reward and honor in the power of the state.”

(She interpolated here that the nearest approach to an aristocracy
they had was to come of a line of “Over Mothers”--those who had been so
honored.)

“But what I do not understand, naturally, is how you prevent it. I
gathered that each woman had five. You have no tyrannical husbands to
hold in check--and you surely do not destroy the unborn--”

The look of ghastly horror she gave me I shall never forget. She started
from her chair, pale, her eyes blazing.

“Destroy the unborn--!” she said in a hard whisper. “Do men do that in
your country?”

“Men!” I began to answer, rather hotly, and then saw the gulf before
me. None of us wanted these women to think that _our_ women, of whom we
boasted so proudly, were in any way inferior to them. I am ashamed
to say that I equivocated. I told her of certain criminal types of
women--perverts, or crazy, who had been known to commit infanticide. I
told her, truly enough, that there was much in our land which was
open to criticism, but that I hated to dwell on our defects until they
understood us and our conditions better.

And, making a wide detour, I scrambled back to my question of how they
limited the population.

As for Somel, she seemed sorry, a little ashamed even, of her too
clearly expressed amazement. As I look back now, knowing them better, I
am more and more and more amazed as I appreciate the exquisite courtesy
with which they had received over and over again statements and
admissions on our part which must have revolted them to the soul.

She explained to me, with sweet seriousness, that as I had supposed, at
first each woman bore five children; and that, in their eager desire
to build up a nation, they had gone on in that way for a few centuries,
till they were confronted with the absolute need of a limit. This fact
was equally plain to all--all were equally interested.

They were now as anxious to check their wonderful power as they had
been to develop it; and for some generations gave the matter their most
earnest thought and study.

“We were living on rations before we worked it out,” she said. “But we
did work it out. You see, before a child comes to one of us there is a
period of utter exaltation--the whole being is uplifted and filled with
a concentrated desire for that child. We learned to look forward to that
period with the greatest caution. Often our young women, those to whom
motherhood had not yet come, would voluntarily defer it. When that deep
inner demand for a child began to be felt she would deliberately engage
in the most active work, physical and mental; and even more important,
would solace her longing by the direct care and service of the babies we
already had.”

She paused. Her wise sweet face grew deeply, reverently tender.

“We soon grew to see that mother-love has more than one channel of
expression. I think the reason our children are so--so fully loved, by
all of us, is that we never--any of us--have enough of our own.”

This seemed to me infinitely pathetic, and I said so. “We have much that
is bitter and hard in our life at home,” I told her, “but this seems to
me piteous beyond words--a whole nation of starving mothers!”

But she smiled her deep contented smile, and said I quite misunderstood.

“We each go without a certain range of personal joy,” she said, “but
remember--we each have a million children to love and serve--_our_
children.”

It was beyond me. To hear a lot of women talk about “our children”! But
I suppose that is the way the ants and bees would talk--do talk, maybe.

That was what they did, anyhow.

When a woman chose to be a mother, she allowed the child-longing to
grow within her till it worked its natural miracle. When she did not so
choose she put the whole thing out of her mind, and fed her heart with
the other babies.

Let me see--with us, children--minors, that is--constitute about
three-fifths of the population; with them only about one-third, or
less. And precious--! No sole heir to an empire’s throne, no solitary
millionaire baby, no only child of middle-aged parents, could compare as
an idol with these Herland children.

But before I start on that subject I must finish up that little analysis
I was trying to make.

They did effectually and permanently limit the population in numbers, so
that the country furnished plenty for the fullest, richest life for all
of them: plenty of everything, including room, air, solitude even.

And then they set to work to improve that population in quality--since
they were restricted in quantity. This they had been at work on,
uninterruptedly, for some fifteen hundred years. Do you wonder they were
nice people?

Physiology, hygiene, sanitation, physical culture--all that line of work
had been perfected long since. Sickness was almost wholly unknown among
them, so much so that a previously high development in what we call the
“science of medicine” had become practically a lost art. They were a
clean-bred, vigorous lot, having the best of care, the most perfect
living conditions always.

When it came to psychology--there was no one thing which left us so
dumbfounded, so really awed, as the everyday working knowledge--and
practice--they had in this line. As we learned more and more of it, we
learned to appreciate the exquisite mastery with which we ourselves,
strangers of alien race, of unknown opposite sex, had been understood
and provided for from the first.

With this wide, deep, thorough knowledge, they had met and solved the
problems of education in ways some of which I hope to make clear later.
Those nation-loved children of theirs compared with the average in our
country as the most perfectly cultivated, richly developed roses compare
with--tumbleweeds. Yet they did not SEEM “cultivated” at all--it had all
become a natural condition.

And this people, steadily developing in mental capacity, in will power,
in social devotion, had been playing with the arts and sciences--as
far as they knew them--for a good many centuries now with inevitable
success.

Into this quiet lovely land, among these wise, sweet, strong women, we,
in our easy assumption of superiority, had suddenly arrived; and now,
tamed and trained to a degree they considered safe, we were at last
brought out to see the country, to know the people.

CHAPTER 7.
Our Growing Modesty

Being at last considered sufficiently tamed and trained to be trusted
with scissors, we barbered ourselves as best we could. A close-trimmed
beard is certainly more comfortable than a full one. Razors, naturally,
they could not supply.

“With so many old women you’d think there’d be some razors,” sneered
Terry. Whereat Jeff pointed out that he never before had seen such
complete absence of facial hair on women.

“Looks to me as if the absence of men made them more feminine in that
regard, anyhow,” he suggested.

“Well, it’s the only one then,” Terry reluctantly agreed. “A less
feminine lot I never saw. A child apiece doesn’t seem to be enough to
develop what I call motherliness.”

Terry’s idea of motherliness was the usual one, involving a baby in
arms, or “a little flock about her knees,” and the complete absorption
of the mother in said baby or flock. A motherliness which dominated
society, which influenced every art and industry, which absolutely
protected all childhood, and gave to it the most perfect care and
training, did not seem motherly--to Terry.

We had become well used to the clothes. They were quite as comfortable
as our own--in some ways more so--and undeniably better looking. As to
pockets, they left nothing to be desired. That second garment was fairly
quilted with pockets. They were most ingeniously arranged, so as to be
convenient to the hand and not inconvenient to the body, and were so
placed as at once to strengthen the garment and add decorative lines of
stitching.

In this, as in so many other points we had now to observe, there was
shown the action of a practical intelligence, coupled with fine artistic
feeling, and, apparently, untrammeled by any injurious influences.

Our first step of comparative freedom was a personally conducted tour of
the country. No pentagonal bodyguard now! Only our special tutors,
and we got on famously with them. Jeff said he loved Zava like an
aunt--“only jollier than any aunt I ever saw”; Somel and I were as
chummy as could be--the best of friends; but it was funny to watch Terry
and Moadine. She was patient with him, and courteous, but it was like
the patience and courtesy of some great man, say a skilled, experienced
diplomat, with a schoolgirl. Her grave acquiescence with his most
preposterous expression of feeling; her genial laughter, not only
with, but, I often felt, at him--though impeccably polite; her
innocent questions, which almost invariably led him to say more than he
intended--Jeff and I found it all amusing to watch.

He never seemed to recognize that quiet background of superiority. When
she dropped an argument he always thought he had silenced her; when she
laughed he thought it tribute to his wit.

I hated to admit to myself how much Terry had sunk in my esteem. Jeff
felt it too, I am sure; but neither of us admitted it to the other.
At home we had measured him with other men, and, though we knew his
failings, he was by no means an unusual type. We knew his virtues too,
and they had always seemed more prominent than the faults. Measured
among women--our women at home, I mean--he had always stood high. He
was visibly popular. Even where his habits were known, there was no
discrimination against him; in some cases his reputation for what was
felicitously termed “gaiety” seemed a special charm.

But here, against the calm wisdom and quiet restrained humor of these
women, with only that blessed Jeff and my inconspicuous self to compare
with, Terry did stand out rather strong.

As “a man among men,” he didn’t; as a man among--I shall have to say,
“females,” he didn’t; his intense masculinity seemed only fit complement
to their intense femininity. But here he was all out of drawing.

Moadine was a big woman, with a balanced strength that seldom showed.
Her eye was as quietly watchful as a fencer’s. She maintained a pleasant
relation with her charge, but I doubt if many, even in that country,
could have done as well.

He called her “Maud,” amongst ourselves, and said she was “a good old
soul, but a little slow”; wherein he was quite wrong. Needless to
say, he called Jeff’s teacher “Java,” and sometimes “Mocha,” or plain
“Coffee”; when specially mischievous, “Chicory,” and even “Postum.” But
Somel rather escaped this form of humor, save for a rather forced “Some
‘ell.”

“Don’t you people have but one name?” he asked one day, after we
had been introduced to a whole group of them, all with pleasant,
few-syllabled strange names, like the ones we knew.

“Oh yes,” Moadine told him. “A good many of us have another, as we get
on in life--a descriptive one. That is the name we earn. Sometimes even
that is changed, or added to, in an unusually rich life. Such as our
present Land Mother--what you call president or king, I believe. She
was called Mera, even as a child; that means ‘thinker.’ Later there
was added Du--Du-Mera--the wise thinker, and now we all know her as
O-du-mera--great and wise thinker. You shall meet her.”

“No surnames at all then?” pursued Terry, with his somewhat patronizing
air. “No family name?”

“Why no,” she said. “Why should we? We are all descended from a common
source--all one ‘family’ in reality. You see, our comparatively brief
and limited history gives us that advantage at least.”

“But does not each mother want her own child to bear her name?” I asked.

“No--why should she? The child has its own.”

“Why for--for identification--so people will know whose child she is.”

“We keep the most careful records,” said Somel. “Each one of us has our
exact line of descent all the way back to our dear First Mother. There
are many reasons for doing that. But as to everyone knowing which child
belongs to which mother--why should she?”

Here, as in so many other instances, we were led to feel the difference
between the purely maternal and the paternal attitude of mind. The
element of personal pride seemed strangely lacking.

“How about your other works?” asked Jeff. “Don’t you sign your names to
them--books and statues and so on?”

“Yes, surely, we are all glad and proud to. Not only books and statues,
but all kinds of work. You will find little names on the houses, on the
furniture, on the dishes sometimes. Because otherwise one is likely to
forget, and we want to know to whom to be grateful.”

“You speak as if it were done for the convenience of the consumer--not
the pride of the producer,” I suggested.

“It’s both,” said Somel. “We have pride enough in our work.”

“Then why not in your children?” urged Jeff.

“But we have! We’re magnificently proud of them,” she insisted.

“Then why not sign ’em?” said Terry triumphantly.

Moadine turned to him with her slightly quizzical smile. “Because the
finished product is not a private one. When they are babies, we do speak
of them, at times, as ‘Essa’s Lato,’ or ‘Novine’s Amel’; but that is
merely descriptive and conversational. In the records, of course,
the child stands in her own line of mothers; but in dealing with it
personally it is Lato, or Amel, without dragging in its ancestors.”

“But have you names enough to give a new one to each child?”

“Assuredly we have, for each living generation.”

Then they asked about our methods, and found first that “we” did so and
so, and then that other nations did differently. Upon which they wanted
to know which method has been proved best--and we had to admit that
so far as we knew there had been no attempt at comparison, each people
pursuing its own custom in the fond conviction of superiority, and
either despising or quite ignoring the others.

With these women the most salient quality in all their institutions was
reasonableness. When I dug into the records to follow out any line of
development, that was the most astonishing thing--the conscious effort
to make it better.

They had early observed the value of certain improvements, had easily
inferred that there was room for more, and took the greatest pains to
develop two kinds of minds--the critic and inventor. Those who showed
an early tendency to observe, to discriminate, to suggest, were given
special training for that function; and some of their highest officials
spent their time in the most careful study of one or another branch of
work, with a view to its further improvement.

In each generation there was sure to arrive some new mind to detect
faults and show need of alterations; and the whole corps of inventors
was at hand to apply their special faculty at the point criticized, and
offer suggestions.

We had learned by this time not to open a discussion on any of their
characteristics without first priming ourselves to answer questions
about our own methods; so I kept rather quiet on this matter of
conscious improvement. We were not prepared to show our way was better.

There was growing in our minds, at least in Jeff’s and mine, a
keen appreciation of the advantages of this strange country and its
management. Terry remained critical. We laid most of it to his nerves.
He certainly was irritable.

The most conspicuous feature of the whole land was the perfection of
its food supply. We had begun to notice from that very first walk in the
forest, the first partial view from our ‘plane. Now we were taken to see
this mighty garden, and shown its methods of culture.

The country was about the size of Holland, some ten or twelve
thousand square miles. One could lose a good many Hollands along the
forest-smothered flanks of those mighty mountains. They had a population
of about three million--not a large one, but quality is something. Three
million is quite enough to allow for considerable variation, and these
people varied more widely than we could at first account for.

Terry had insisted that if they were parthenogenetic they’d be as alike
as so many ants or aphids; he urged their visible differences as proof
that there must be men--somewhere.

But when we asked them, in our later, more intimate conversations, how
they accounted for so much divergence without cross-fertilization,
they attributed it partly to the careful education, which followed each
slight tendency to differ, and partly to the law of mutation. This they
had found in their work with plants, and fully proven in their own case.

Physically they were more alike than we, as they lacked all morbid or
excessive types. They were tall, strong, healthy, and beautiful as a
race, but differed individually in a wide range of feature, coloring,
and expression.

“But surely the most important growth is in mind--and in the things we
make,” urged Somel. “Do you find your physical variation accompanied by
a proportionate variation in ideas, feelings, and products? Or, among
people who look more alike, do you find their internal life and their
work as similar?”

We were rather doubtful on this point, and inclined to hold that there
was more chance of improvement in greater physical variation.

“It certainly should be,” Zava admitted. “We have always thought it a
grave initial misfortune to have lost half our little world. Perhaps
that is one reason why we have so striven for conscious improvement.”

“But acquired traits are not transmissible,” Terry declared. “Weissman
has proved that.”

They never disputed our absolute statements, only made notes of them.

“If that is so, then our improvement must be due either to mutation, or
solely to education,” she gravely pursued. “We certainly have improved.
It may be that all these higher qualities were latent in the original
mother, that careful education is bringing them out, and that our
personal differences depend on slight variations in prenatal condition.”

“I think it is more in your accumulated culture,” Jeff suggested. “And
in the amazing psychic growth you have made. We know very little about
methods of real soul culture--and you seem to know a great deal.”

Be that as it might, they certainly presented a higher level of active
intelligence, and of behavior, than we had so far really grasped. Having
known in our lives several people who showed the same delicate courtesy
and were equally pleasant to live with, at least when they wore their
“company manners,” we had assumed that our companions were a carefully
chosen few. Later we were more and more impressed that all this gentle
breeding was breeding; that they were born to it, reared in it, that it
was as natural and universal with them as the gentleness of doves or the
alleged wisdom of serpents.

As for the intelligence, I confess that this was the most impressive
and, to me, most mortifying, of any single feature of Herland. We soon
ceased to comment on this or other matters which to them were such
obvious commonplaces as to call forth embarrassing questions about our
own conditions.

This was nowhere better shown than in that matter of food supply, which
I will now attempt to describe.

Having improved their agriculture to the highest point, and carefully
estimated the number of persons who could comfortably live on their
square miles; having then limited their population to that number, one
would think that was all there was to be done. But they had not thought
so. To them the country was a unit--it was theirs. They themselves were
a unit, a conscious group; they thought in terms of the community. As
such, their time-sense was not limited to the hopes and ambitions of an
individual life. Therefore, they habitually considered and carried out
plans for improvement which might cover centuries.

I had never seen, had scarcely imagined, human beings undertaking such
a work as the deliberate replanting of an entire forest area with
different kinds of trees. Yet this seemed to them the simplest common
sense, like a man’s plowing up an inferior lawn and reseeding it. Now
every tree bore fruit--edible fruit, that is. In the case of one
tree, in which they took especial pride, it had originally no fruit at
all--that is, none humanly edible--yet was so beautiful that they wished
to keep it. For nine hundred years they had experimented, and now
showed us this particularly lovely graceful tree, with a profuse crop of
nutritious seeds.

They had early decided that trees were the best food plants, requiring
far less labor in tilling the soil, and bearing a larger amount of food
for the same ground space; also doing much to preserve and enrich the
soil.

Due regard had been paid to seasonable crops, and their fruit and nuts,
grains and berries, kept on almost the year through.

On the higher part of the country, near the backing wall of mountains,
they had a real winter with snow. Toward the south-eastern point, where
there was a large valley with a lake whose outlet was subterranean, the
climate was like that of California, and citrus fruits, figs, and olives
grew abundantly.

What impressed me particularly was their scheme of fertilization. Here
was this little shut-in piece of land where one would have thought an
ordinary people would have been starved out long ago or reduced to an
annual struggle for life. These careful culturists had worked out a
perfect scheme of refeeding the soil with all that came out of it. All
the scraps and leavings of their food, plant waste from lumber work or
textile industry, all the solid matter from the sewage, properly treated
and combined--everything which came from the earth went back to it.

The practical result was like that in any healthy forest; an
increasingly valuable soil was being built, instead of the progressive
impoverishment so often seen in the rest of the world.

When this first burst upon us we made such approving comments that they
were surprised that such obvious common sense should be praised; asked
what our methods were; and we had some difficulty in--well, in
diverting them, by referring to the extent of our own land, and
the--admitted--carelessness with which we had skimmed the cream of it.

At least we thought we had diverted them. Later I found that besides
keeping a careful and accurate account of all we told them, they had a
sort of skeleton chart, on which the things we said and the things we
palpably avoided saying were all set down and studied. It really was
child’s play for those profound educators to work out a painfully
accurate estimate of our conditions--in some lines. When a given line of
observation seemed to lead to some very dreadful inference they always
gave us the benefit of the doubt, leaving it open to further knowledge.
Some of the things we had grown to accept as perfectly natural, or
as belonging to our human limitations, they literally could not have
believed; and, as I have said, we had all of us joined in a tacit
endeavor to conceal much of the social status at home.

“Confound their grandmotherly minds!” Terry said. “Of course they can’t
understand a Man’s World! They aren’t human--they’re just a pack of
Fe-Fe-Females!” This was after he had to admit their parthenogenesis.

“I wish our grandfatherly minds had managed as well,” said Jeff. “Do you
really think it’s to our credit that we have muddled along with all our
poverty and disease and the like? They have peace and plenty, wealth and
beauty, goodness and intellect. Pretty good people, I think!”

“You’ll find they have their faults too,” Terry insisted; and partly in
self-defense, we all three began to look for those faults of theirs.
We had been very strong on this subject before we got there--in those
baseless speculations of ours.

“Suppose there is a country of women only,” Jeff had put it, over and
over. “What’ll they be like?”

And we had been cocksure as to the inevitable limitations, the faults
and vices, of a lot of women. We had expected them to be given over to
what we called “feminine vanity”--“frills and furbelows,” and we found
they had evolved a costume more perfect than the Chinese dress, richly
beautiful when so desired, always useful, of unfailing dignity and good
taste.

We had expected a dull submissive monotony, and found a daring social
inventiveness far beyond our own, and a mechanical and scientific
development fully equal to ours.

We had expected pettiness, and found a social consciousness besides
which our nations looked like quarreling children--feebleminded ones at
that.

We had expected jealousy, and found a broad sisterly affection, a
fair-minded intelligence, to which we could produce no parallel.

We had expected hysteria, and found a standard of health and vigor, a
calmness of temper, to which the habit of profanity, for instance, was
impossible to explain--we tried it.

All these things even Terry had to admit, but he still insisted that we
should find out the other side pretty soon.

“It stands to reason, doesn’t it?” he argued. “The whole thing’s deuced
unnatural--I’d say impossible if we weren’t in it. And an unnatural
condition’s sure to have unnatural results. You’ll find some awful
characteristics--see if you don’t! For instance--we don’t know yet what
they do with their criminals--their defectives--their aged. You notice
we haven’t seen any! There’s got to be something!”

I was inclined to believe that there had to be something, so I took the
bull by the horns--the cow, I should say!--and asked Somel.

“I want to find some flaw in all this perfection,” I told her flatly.
“It simply isn’t possible that three million people have no faults. We
are trying our best to understand and learn--would you mind helping us
by saying what, to your minds, are the worst qualities of this unique
civilization of yours?”

We were sitting together in a shaded arbor, in one of those
eating-gardens of theirs. The delicious food had been eaten, a plate of
fruit still before us. We could look out on one side over a stretch of
open country, quietly rich and lovely; on the other, the garden, with
tables here and there, far apart enough for privacy. Let me say right
here that with all their careful “balance of population” there was no
crowding in this country. There was room, space, a sunny breezy freedom
everywhere.

Somel set her chin upon her hand, her elbow on the low wall beside her,
and looked off over the fair land.

“Of course we have faults--all of us,” she said. “In one way you
might say that we have more than we used to--that is, our standard
of perfection seems to get farther and farther away. But we are not
discouraged, because our records do show gain--considerable gain.

“When we began--even with the start of one particularly noble mother--we
inherited the characteristics of a long race-record behind her. And they
cropped out from time to time--alarmingly. But it is--yes, quite six
hundred years since we have had what you call a ‘criminal.’

“We have, of course, made it our first business to train out, to breed
out, when possible, the lowest types.”

“Breed out?” I asked. “How could you--with parthenogenesis?”

“If the girl showing the bad qualities had still the power to appreciate
social duty, we appealed to her, by that, to renounce motherhood. Some
of the few worst types were, fortunately, unable to reproduce. But if
the fault was in a disproportionate egotism--then the girl was sure
she had the right to have children, even that hers would be better than
others.”

“I can see that,” I said. “And then she would be likely to rear them in
the same spirit.”

“That we never allowed,” answered Somel quietly.

“Allowed?” I queried. “Allowed a mother to rear her own children?”

“Certainly not,” said Somel, “unless she was fit for that supreme task.”

This was rather a blow to my previous convictions.

“But I thought motherhood was for each of you--”

“Motherhood--yes, that is, maternity, to bear a child. But education is
our highest art, only allowed to our highest artists.”

“Education?” I was puzzled again. “I don’t mean education. I mean by
motherhood not only child-bearing, but the care of babies.”

“The care of babies involves education, and is entrusted only to the
most fit,” she repeated.

“Then you separate mother and child!” I cried in cold horror, something
of Terry’s feeling creeping over me, that there must be something wrong
among these many virtues.

“Not usually,” she patiently explained. “You see, almost every woman
values her maternity above everything else. Each girl holds it close
and dear, an exquisite joy, a crowning honor, the most intimate, most
personal, most precious thing. That is, the child-rearing has come to
be with us a culture so profoundly studied, practiced with such subtlety
and skill, that the more we love our children the less we are willing to
trust that process to unskilled hands--even our own.”

“But a mother’s love--” I ventured.

She studied my face, trying to work out a means of clear explanation.

“You told us about your dentists,” she said, at length, “those quaintly
specialized persons who spend their lives filling little holes in other
persons’ teeth--even in children’s teeth sometimes.”

“Yes?” I said, not getting her drift.

“Does mother-love urge mothers--with you--to fill their own children’s
teeth? Or to wish to?”

“Why no--of course not,” I protested. “But that is a highly specialized
craft. Surely the care of babies is open to any woman--any mother!”

“We do not think so,” she gently replied. “Those of us who are the
most highly competent fulfill that office; and a majority of our girls
eagerly try for it--I assure you we have the very best.”

“But the poor mother--bereaved of her baby--”

“Oh no!” she earnestly assured me. “Not in the least bereaved. It is her
baby still--it is with her--she has not lost it. But she is not the only
one to care for it. There are others whom she knows to be wiser. She
knows it because she has studied as they did, practiced as they did, and
honors their real superiority. For the child’s sake, she is glad to have
for it this highest care.”

I was unconvinced. Besides, this was only hearsay; I had yet to see the
motherhood of Herland.

CHAPTER 8.
The Girls of Herland

At last Terry’s ambition was realized. We were invited, always
courteously and with free choice on our part, to address general
audiences and classes of girls.

I remember the first time--and how careful we were about our clothes,
and our amateur barbering. Terry, in particular, was fussy to a degree
about the cut of his beard, and so critical of our combined efforts,
that we handed him the shears and told him to please himself. We
began to rather prize those beards of ours; they were almost our sole
distinction among those tall and sturdy women, with their cropped hair
and sexless costume. Being offered a wide selection of garments, we had
chosen according to our personal taste, and were surprised to find,
on meeting large audiences, that we were the most highly decorated,
especially Terry.

He was a very impressive figure, his strong features softened by the
somewhat longer hair--though he made me trim it as closely as I knew
how; and he wore his richly embroidered tunic with its broad, loose
girdle with quite a Henry V air. Jeff looked more like--well, like a
Huguenot Lover; and I don’t know what I looked like, only that I felt
very comfortable. When I got back to our own padded armor and its
starched borders I realized with acute regret how comfortable were those
Herland clothes.

We scanned that audience, looking for the three bright faces we knew;
but they were not to be seen. Just a multitude of girls: quiet, eager,
watchful, all eyes and ears to listen and learn.

We had been urged to give, as fully as we cared to, a sort of synopsis
of world history, in brief, and to answer questions.

“We are so utterly ignorant, you see,” Moadine had explained to us. “We
know nothing but such science as we have worked out for ourselves,
just the brain work of one small half-country; and you, we gather, have
helped one another all over the globe, sharing your discoveries, pooling
your progress. How wonderful, how supremely beautiful your civilization
must be!”

Somel gave a further suggestion.

“You do not have to begin all over again, as you did with us. We have
made a sort of digest of what we have learned from you, and it has been
eagerly absorbed, all over the country. Perhaps you would like to see
our outline?”

We were eager to see it, and deeply impressed. To us, at first, these
women, unavoidably ignorant of what to us was the basic commonplace of
knowledge, had seemed on the plane of children, or of savages. What we
had been forced to admit, with growing acquaintance, was that they
were ignorant as Plato and Aristotle were, but with a highly developed
mentality quite comparable to that of Ancient Greece.

Far be it from me to lumber these pages with an account of what we so
imperfectly strove to teach them. The memorable fact is what they taught
us, or some faint glimpse of it. And at present, our major interest was
not at all in the subject matter of our talk, but in the audience.

Girls--hundreds of them--eager, bright-eyed, attentive young faces;
crowding questions, and, I regret to say, an increasing inability on our
part to answer them effectively.

Our special guides, who were on the platform with us, and sometimes
aided in clarifying a question or, oftener, an answer, noticed this
effect, and closed the formal lecture part of the evening rather
shortly.

“Our young women will be glad to meet you,” Somel suggested, “to talk
with you more personally, if you are willing?”

Willing! We were impatient and said as much, at which I saw a flickering
little smile cross Moadine’s face. Even then, with all those eager young
things waiting to talk to us, a sudden question crossed my mind: “What
was their point of view? What did they think of us?” We learned that
later.

Terry plunged in among those young creatures with a sort of rapture,
somewhat as a glad swimmer takes to the sea. Jeff, with a rapt look on
his high-bred face, approached as to a sacrament. But I was a little
chilled by that last thought of mine, and kept my eyes open. I found
time to watch Jeff, even while I was surrounded by an eager group of
questioners--as we all were--and saw how his worshipping eyes, his grave
courtesy, pleased and drew some of them; while others, rather stronger
spirits they looked to be, drew away from his group to Terry’s or mine.

I watched Terry with special interest, knowing how he had longed for
this time, and how irresistible he had always been at home. And I could
see, just in snatches, of course, how his suave and masterful approach
seemed to irritate them; his too-intimate glances were vaguely resented,
his compliments puzzled and annoyed. Sometimes a girl would flush, not
with drooped eyelids and inviting timidity, but with anger and a quick
lift of the head. Girl after girl turned on her heel and left him, till
he had but a small ring of questioners, and they, visibly, were the
least “girlish” of the lot.

I saw him looking pleased at first, as if he thought he was making
a strong impression; but, finally, casting a look at Jeff, or me, he
seemed less pleased--and less.

As for me, I was most agreeably surprised. At home I never
was “popular.” I had my girl friends, good ones, but they were
friends--nothing else. Also they were of somewhat the same clan, not
popular in the sense of swarming admirers. But here, to my astonishment,
I found my crowd was the largest.

I have to generalize, of course, rather telescoping many impressions;
but the first evening was a good sample of the impression we made. Jeff
had a following, if I may call it that, of the more sentimental--though
that’s not the word I want. The less practical, perhaps; the girls who
were artists of some sort, ethicists, teachers--that kind.

Terry was reduced to a rather combative group: keen, logical, inquiring
minds, not overly sensitive, the very kind he liked least; while, as for
me--I became quite cocky over my general popularity.

Terry was furious about it. We could hardly blame him.

“Girls!” he burst forth, when that evening was over and we were by
ourselves once more. “Call those _girls!_”

“Most delightful girls, I call them,” said Jeff, his blue eyes dreamily
contented.

“What do _you_ call them?” I mildly inquired.

“Boys! Nothing but boys, most of ’em. A standoffish, disagreeable lot at
that. Critical, impertinent youngsters. No girls at all.”

He was angry and severe, not a little jealous, too, I think. Afterward,
when he found out just what it was they did not like, he changed his
manner somewhat and got on better. He had to. For, in spite of his
criticism, they were girls, and, furthermore, all the girls there
were! Always excepting our three!--with whom we presently renewed our
acquaintance.

When it came to courtship, which it soon did, I can of course best
describe my own--and am least inclined to. But of Jeff I heard somewhat;
he was inclined to dwell reverently and admiringly, at some length,
on the exalted sentiment and measureless perfection of his Celis; and
Terry--Terry made so many false starts and met so many rebuffs, that by
the time he really settled down to win Alima, he was considerably wiser.
At that, it was not smooth sailing. They broke and quarreled, over and
over; he would rush off to console himself with some other fair one--the
other fair one would have none of him--and he would drift back to Alima,
becoming more and more devoted each time.

She never gave an inch. A big, handsome creature, rather exceptionally
strong even in that race of strong women, with a proud head and sweeping
level brows that lined across above her dark eager eyes like the wide
wings of a soaring hawk.

I was good friends with all three of them but best of all with Ellador,
long before that feeling changed, for both of us.

From her, and from Somel, who talked very freely with me, I learned at
last something of the viewpoint of Herland toward its visitors.

Here they were, isolated, happy, contented, when the booming buzz of our
biplane tore the air above them.

Everybody heard it--saw it--for miles and miles, word flashed all over
the country, and a council was held in every town and village.

And this was their rapid determination:

“From another country. Probably men. Evidently highly civilized.
Doubtless possessed of much valuable knowledge. May be dangerous. Catch
them if possible; tame and train them if necessary This may be a chance
to re-establish a bi-sexual state for our people.”

They were not afraid of us--three million highly intelligent women--or
two million, counting only grown-ups--were not likely to be afraid of
three young men. We thought of them as “Women,” and therefore timid; but
it was two thousand years since they had had anything to be afraid
of, and certainly more than one thousand since they had outgrown the
feeling.

We thought--at least Terry did--that we could have our pick of them.
They thought--very cautiously and farsightedly--of picking us, if it
seemed wise.

All that time we were in training they studied us, analyzed us, prepared
reports about us, and this information was widely disseminated all about
the land.

Not a girl in that country had not been learning for months as much
as could be gathered about our country, our culture, our personal
characters. No wonder their questions were hard to answer. But I am
sorry to say, when we were at last brought out and--exhibited (I hate to
call it that, but that’s what it was), there was no rush of takers. Here
was poor old Terry fondly imagining that at last he was free to stray in
“a rosebud garden of girls”--and behold! the rosebuds were all with keen
appraising eye, studying us.

They were interested, profoundly interested, but it was not the kind of
interest we were looking for.

To get an idea of their attitude you have to hold in mind their
extremely high sense of solidarity. They were not each choosing a
lover; they hadn’t the faintest idea of love--sex-love, that is. These
girls--to each of whom motherhood was a lodestar, and that motherhood
exalted above a mere personal function, looked forward to as the highest
social service, as the sacrament of a lifetime--were now confronted with
an opportunity to make the great step of changing their whole status, of
reverting to their earlier bi-sexual order of nature.

Beside this underlying consideration there was the limitless interest
and curiosity in our civilization, purely impersonal, and held by an
order of mind beside which we were like--schoolboys.

It was small wonder that our lectures were not a success; and none at
all that our, or at least Terry’s, advances were so ill received. The
reason for my own comparative success was at first far from pleasing to
my pride.

“We like you the best,” Somel told me, “because you seem more like us.”

“More like a lot of women!” I thought to myself disgustedly, and then
remembered how little like “women,” in our derogatory sense, they were.
She was smiling at me, reading my thought.

“We can quite see that we do not seem like--women--to you. Of course,
in a bi-sexual race the distinctive feature of each sex must be
intensified. But surely there are characteristics enough which belong
to People, aren’t there? That’s what I mean about you being more like
us--more like People. We feel at ease with you.”

Jeff’s difficulty was his exalted gallantry. He idealized women, and
was always looking for a chance to “protect” or to “serve” them. These
needed neither protection nor service. They were living in peace and
power and plenty; we were their guests, their prisoners, absolutely
dependent.

Of course we could promise whatsoever we might of advantages, if they
would come to our country; but the more we knew of theirs, the less we
boasted.

Terry’s jewels and trinkets they prized as curios; handed them about,
asking questions as to workmanship, not in the least as to value; and
discussed not ownership, but which museum to put them in.

When a man has nothing to give a woman, is dependent wholly on his
personal attraction, his courtship is under limitations.

They were considering these two things: the advisability of making the
Great Change; and the degree of personal adaptability which would best
serve that end.

Here we had the advantage of our small personal experience with those
three fleet forest girls; and that served to draw us together.

As for Ellador: Suppose you come to a strange land and find it pleasant
enough--just a little more than ordinarily pleasant--and then you find
rich farmland, and then gardens, gorgeous gardens, and then palaces
full of rare and curious treasures--incalculable, inexhaustible, and
then--mountains--like the Himalayas, and then the sea.

I liked her that day she balanced on the branch before me and named the
trio. I thought of her most. Afterward I turned to her like a friend
when we met for the third time, and continued the acquaintance. While
Jeff’s ultra-devotion rather puzzled Celis, really put off their day
of happiness, while Terry and Alima quarreled and parted, re-met and
re-parted, Ellador and I grew to be close friends.

We talked and talked. We took long walks together. She showed me things,
explained them, interpreted much that I had not understood. Through her
sympathetic intelligence I became more and more comprehending of the
spirit of the people of Herland, more and more appreciative of its
marvelous inner growth as well as outer perfection.

I ceased to feel a stranger, a prisoner. There was a sense of
understanding, of identity, of purpose. We discussed--everything. And,
as I traveled farther and farther, exploring the rich, sweet soul of
her, my sense of pleasant friendship became but a broad foundation for
such height, such breadth, such interlocked combination of feeling as
left me fairly blinded with the wonder of it.

As I’ve said, I had never cared very much for women, nor they for
me--not Terry-fashion. But this one--

At first I never even thought of her “in that way,” as the girls have
it. I had not come to the country with any Turkish-harem intentions,
and I was no woman-worshipper like Jeff. I just liked that girl “as a
friend,” as we say. That friendship grew like a tree. She was _such_ a
good sport! We did all kinds of things together. She taught me games and
I taught her games, and we raced and rowed and had all manner of fun, as
well as higher comradeship.

Then, as I got on farther, the palace and treasures and snowy mountain
ranges opened up. I had never known there could be such a human being.
So--great. I don’t mean talented. She was a forester--one of the
best--but it was not that gift I mean. When I say _great_, I mean
great--big, all through. If I had known more of those women, as
intimately, I should not have found her so unique; but even among them
she was noble. Her mother was an Over Mother--and her grandmother, too,
I heard later.

So she told me more and more of her beautiful land; and I told her as
much, yes, more than I wanted to, about mine; and we became inseparable.
Then this deeper recognition came and grew. I felt my own soul rise
and lift its wings, as it were. Life got bigger. It seemed as if I
understood--as I never had before--as if I could Do things--as if I too
could grow--if she would help me. And then It came--to both of us, all
at once.

A still day--on the edge of the world, their world. The two of us,
gazing out over the far dim forestland below, talking of heaven and
earth and human life, and of my land and other lands and what they
needed and what I hoped to do for them--

“If you will help me,” I said.

She turned to me, with that high, sweet look of hers, and then, as her
eyes rested in mine and her hands too--then suddenly there blazed out
between us a farther glory, instant, overwhelming--quite beyond any
words of mine to tell.

Celis was a blue-and-gold-and-rose person; Alma,
black-and-white-and-red, a blazing beauty. Ellador was brown: hair dark
and soft, like a seal coat; clear brown skin with a healthy red in
it; brown eyes--all the way from topaz to black velvet they seemed to
range--splendid girls, all of them.

They had seen us first of all, far down in the lake below, and flashed
the tidings across the land even before our first exploring flight. They
had watched our landing, flitted through the forest with us, hidden in
that tree and--I shrewdly suspect--giggled on purpose.

They had kept watch over our hooded machine, taking turns at it; and
when our escape was announced, had followed along-side for a day or two,
and been there at the last, as described. They felt a special claim on
us--called us “their men”--and when we were at liberty to study the land
and people, and be studied by them, their claim was recognized by the
wise leaders.

But I felt, we all did, that we should have chosen them among millions,
unerringly.

And yet “the path of true love never did run smooth”; this period of
courtship was full of the most unsuspected pitfalls.

Writing this as late as I do, after manifold experiences both in Herland
and, later, in my own land, I can now understand and philosophize about
what was then a continual astonishment and often a temporary tragedy.

The “long suit” in most courtships is sex attraction, of course. Then
gradually develops such comradeship as the two temperaments allow. Then,
after marriage, there is either the establishment of a slow-growing,
widely based friendship, the deepest, tenderest, sweetest of relations,
all lit and warmed by the recurrent flame of love; or else that process
is reversed, love cools and fades, no friendship grows, the whole
relation turns from beauty to ashes.

Here everything was different. There was no sex-feeling to appeal to, or
practically none. Two thousand years’ disuse had left very little of the
instinct; also we must remember that those who had at times manifested
it as atavistic exceptions were often, by that very fact, denied
motherhood.

Yet while the mother process remains, the inherent ground for
sex-distinction remains also; and who shall say what long-forgotten
feeling, vague and nameless, was stirred in some of these mother hearts
by our arrival?

What left us even more at sea in our approach was the lack of any
sex-tradition. There was no accepted standard of what was “manly” and
what was “womanly.”

When Jeff said, taking the fruit basket from his adored one, “A woman
should not carry anything,” Celis said, “Why?” with the frankest
amazement. He could not look that fleet-footed, deep-chested young
forester in the face and say, “Because she is weaker.” She wasn’t. One
does not call a race horse weak because it is visibly not a cart horse.

He said, rather lamely, that women were not built for heavy work.

She looked out across the fields to where some women were working,
building a new bit of wall out of large stones; looked back at the
nearest town with its woman-built houses; down at the smooth, hard road
we were walking on; and then at the little basket he had taken from her.

“I don’t understand,” she said quite sweetly. “Are the women in your
country so weak that they could not carry such a thing as that?”

“It is a convention,” he said. “We assume that motherhood is a
sufficient burden--that men should carry all the others.”

“What a beautiful feeling!” she said, her blue eyes shining.

“Does it work?” asked Alima, in her keen, swift way. “Do all men in all
countries carry everything? Or is it only in yours?”

“Don’t be so literal,” Terry begged lazily. “Why aren’t you willing to
be worshipped and waited on? We like to do it.”

“You don’t like to have us do it to you,” she answered.

“That’s different,” he said, annoyed; and when she said, “Why is it?” he
quite sulked, referring her to me, saying, “Van’s the philosopher.”

Ellador and I talked it all out together, so that we had an easier
experience of it when the real miracle time came. Also, between us, we
made things clearer to Jeff and Celis. But Terry would not listen to
reason.

He was madly in love with Alima. He wanted to take her by storm, and
nearly lost her forever.

You see, if a man loves a girl who is in the first place young and
inexperienced; who in the second place is educated with a background
of caveman tradition, a middle-ground of poetry and romance, and a
foreground of unspoken hope and interest all centering upon the one
Event; and who has, furthermore, absolutely no other hope or interest
worthy of the name--why, it is a comparatively easy matter to sweep
her off her feet with a dashing attack. Terry was a past master in this
process. He tried it here, and Alima was so affronted, so repelled, that
it was weeks before he got near enough to try again.

The more coldly she denied him, the hotter his determination; he was
not used to real refusal. The approach of flattery she dismissed with
laughter, gifts and such “attentions” we could not bring to bear, pathos
and complaint of cruelty stirred only a reasoning inquiry. It took Terry
a long time.

I doubt if she ever accepted her strange lover as fully as did Celis
and Ellador theirs. He had hurt and offended her too often; there were
reservations.

But I think Alima retained some faint vestige of long-descended feeling
which made Terry more possible to her than to others; and that she had
made up her mind to the experiment and hated to renounce it.

However it came about, we all three at length achieved full
understanding, and solemnly faced what was to them a step of measureless
importance, a grave question as well as a great happiness; to us a
strange, new joy.

Of marriage as a ceremony they knew nothing. Jeff was for bringing them
to our country for the religious and the civil ceremony, but neither
Celis nor the others would consent.

“We can’t expect them to want to go with us--yet,” said Terry sagely.
“Wait a bit, boys. We’ve got to take ’em on their own terms--if at all.”
 This, in rueful reminiscence of his repeated failures.

“But our time’s coming,” he added cheerfully. “These women have never
been mastered, you see--” This, as one who had made a discovery.

“You’d better not try to do any mastering if you value your chances,”
 I told him seriously; but he only laughed, and said, “Every man to his
trade!”

We couldn’t do anything with him. He had to take his own medicine.

If the lack of tradition of courtship left us much at sea in our
wooing, we found ourselves still more bewildered by lack of tradition of
matrimony.

And here again, I have to draw on later experience, and as deep an
acquaintance with their culture as I could achieve, to explain the gulfs
of difference between us.

Two thousand years of one continuous culture with no men. Back of that,
only traditions of the harem. They had no exact analogue for our word
_home_, any more than they had for our Roman-based _family_.

They loved one another with a practically universal affection, rising
to exquisite and unbroken friendships, and broadening to a devotion to
their country and people for which our word _patriotism_ is no
definition at all.

Patriotism, red hot, is compatible with the existence of a neglect of
national interests, a dishonesty, a cold indifference to the
suffering of millions. Patriotism is largely pride, and very largely
combativeness. Patriotism generally has a chip on its shoulder.

This country had no other country to measure itself by--save the few
poor savages far below, with whom they had no contact.

They loved their country because it was their nursery, playground,
and workshop--theirs and their children’s. They were proud of it as a
workshop, proud of their record of ever-increasing efficiency; they had
made a pleasant garden of it, a very practical little heaven; but most
of all they valued it--and here it is hard for us to understand them--as
a cultural environment for their children.

That, of course, is the keynote of the whole distinction--their
children.

From those first breathlessly guarded, half-adored race mothers, all
up the ascending line, they had this dominant thought of building up a
great race through the children.

All the surrendering devotion our women have put into their private
families, these women put into their country and race. All the loyalty
and service men expect of wives, they gave, not singly to men, but
collectively to one another.

And the mother instinct, with us so painfully intense, so thwarted by
conditions, so concentrated in personal devotion to a few, so bitterly
hurt by death, disease, or barrenness, and even by the mere growth
of the children, leaving the mother alone in her empty nest--all this
feeling with them flowed out in a strong, wide current, unbroken through
the generations, deepening and widening through the years, including
every child in all the land.

With their united power and wisdom, they had studied and overcome the
“diseases of childhood”--their children had none.

They had faced the problems of education and so solved them that their
children grew up as naturally as young trees; learning through every
sense; taught continuously but unconsciously--never knowing they were
being educated.

In fact, they did not use the word as we do. Their idea of education was
the special training they took, when half grown up, under experts. Then
the eager young minds fairly flung themselves on their chosen subjects,
and acquired with an ease, a breadth, a grasp, at which I never ceased
to wonder.

But the babies and little children never felt the pressure of that
“forcible feeding” of the mind that we call “education.” Of this, more
later.

CHAPTER 9.
Our Relations and Theirs

What I’m trying to show here is that with these women the whole
relationship of life counted in a glad, eager growing-up to join the
ranks of workers in the line best loved; a deep, tender reverence for
one’s own mother--too deep for them to speak of freely--and beyond that,
the whole, free, wide range of sisterhood, the splendid service of the
country, and friendships.

To these women we came, filled with the ideas, convictions, traditions,
of our culture, and undertook to rouse in them the emotions which--to
us--seemed proper.

However much, or little, of true sex-feeling there was between us, it
phrased itself in their minds in terms of friendship, the one purely
personal love they knew, and of ultimate parentage. Visibly we were not
mothers, nor children, nor compatriots; so, if they loved us, we must be
friends.

That we should pair off together in our courting days was natural to
them; that we three should remain much together, as they did themselves,
was also natural. We had as yet no work, so we hung about them in their
forest tasks; that was natural, too.

But when we began to talk about each couple having “homes” of our own,
they could not understand it.

“Our work takes us all around the country,” explained Celis. “We cannot
live in one place all the time.”

“We are together now,” urged Alima, looking proudly at Terry’s stalwart
nearness. (This was one of the times when they were “on,” though
presently “off” again.)

“It’s not the same thing at all,” he insisted. “A man wants a home of
his own, with his wife and family in it.”

“Staying in it? All the time?” asked Ellador. “Not imprisoned, surely!”

“Of course not! Living there--naturally,” he answered.

“What does she do there--all the time?” Alima demanded. “What is her
work?”

Then Terry patiently explained again that our women did not work--with
reservations.

“But what do they do--if they have no work?” she persisted.

“They take care of the home--and the children.”

“At the same time?” asked Ellador.

“Why yes. The children play about, and the mother has charge of it all.
There are servants, of course.”

It seemed so obvious, so natural to Terry, that he always grew
impatient; but the girls were honestly anxious to understand.

“How many children do your women have?” Alima had her notebook out now,
and a rather firm set of lip. Terry began to dodge.

“There is no set number, my dear,” he explained. “Some have more, some
have less.”

“Some have none at all,” I put in mischievously.

They pounced on this admission and soon wrung from us the general fact
that those women who had the most children had the least servants, and
those who had the most servants had the least children.

“There!” triumphed Alima. “One or two or no children, and three or four
servants. Now what do those women _do?_”

We explained as best we might. We talked of “social duties,”
 disingenuously banking on their not interpreting the words as we did; we
talked of hospitality, entertainment, and various “interests.” All the
time we knew that to these large-minded women whose whole mental outlook
was so collective, the limitations of a wholly personal life were
inconceivable.

“We cannot really understand it,” Ellador concluded. “We are only half
a people. We have our woman-ways and they have their man-ways and their
both-ways. We have worked out a system of living which is, of course,
limited. They must have a broader, richer, better one. I should like to
see it.”

“You shall, dearest,” I whispered.

“There’s nothing to smoke,” complained Terry. He was in the midst of a
prolonged quarrel with Alima, and needed a sedative. “There’s nothing to
drink. These blessed women have no pleasant vices. I wish we could get
out of here!”

This wish was vain. We were always under a certain degree of
watchfulness. When Terry burst forth to tramp the streets at night he
always found a “Colonel” here or there; and when, on an occasion of
fierce though temporary despair, he had plunged to the cliff edge with
some vague view to escape, he found several of them close by. We were
free--but there was a string to it.

“They’ve no unpleasant ones, either,” Jeff reminded him.

“Wish they had!” Terry persisted. “They’ve neither the vices of men, nor
the virtues of women--they’re neuters!”

“You know better than that. Don’t talk nonsense,” said I, severely.

I was thinking of Ellador’s eyes when they gave me a certain look, a
look she did not at all realize.

Jeff was equally incensed. “I don’t know what ‘virtues of women’ you
miss. Seems to me they have all of them.”

“They’ve no modesty,” snapped Terry. “No patience, no submissiveness,
none of that natural yielding which is woman’s greatest charm.”

I shook my head pityingly. “Go and apologize and make friends again,
Terry. You’ve got a grouch, that’s all. These women have the virtue
of humanity, with less of its faults than any folks I ever saw. As for
patience--they’d have pitched us over the cliffs the first day we lit
among ’em, if they hadn’t that.”

“There are no--distractions,” he grumbled. “Nowhere a man can go and cut
loose a bit. It’s an everlasting parlor and nursery.”

“And workshop,” I added. “And school, and office, and laboratory, and
studio, and theater, and--home.”

“_Home!_” he sneered. “There isn’t a home in the whole pitiful place.”

“There isn’t anything else, and you know it,” Jeff retorted hotly. “I
never saw, I never dreamed of, such universal peace and good will and
mutual affection.”

“Oh, well, of course, if you like a perpetual Sunday school, it’s all
very well. But I like Something Doing. Here it’s all done.”

There was something to this criticism. The years of pioneering lay far
behind them. Theirs was a civilization in which the initial difficulties
had long since been overcome. The untroubled peace, the unmeasured
plenty, the steady health, the large good will and smooth management
which ordered everything, left nothing to overcome. It was like a
pleasant family in an old established, perfectly run country place.

I liked it because of my eager and continued interest in the
sociological achievements involved. Jeff liked it as he would have liked
such a family and such a place anywhere.

Terry did not like it because he found nothing to oppose, to struggle
with, to conquer.

“Life is a struggle, has to be,” he insisted. “If there is no struggle,
there is no life--that’s all.”

“You’re talking nonsense--masculine nonsense,” the peaceful Jeff
replied. He was certainly a warm defender of Herland. “Ants don’t raise
their myriads by a struggle, do they? Or the bees?”

“Oh, if you go back to insects--and want to live in an anthill--! I tell
you the higher grades of life are reached only through struggle--combat.
There’s no Drama here. Look at their plays! They make me sick.”

He rather had us there. The drama of the country was--to our
taste--rather flat. You see, they lacked the sex motive and, with it,
jealousy. They had no interplay of warring nations, no aristocracy and
its ambitions, no wealth and poverty opposition.

I see I have said little about the economics of the place; it should
have come before, but I’ll go on about the drama now.

They had their own kind. There was a most impressive array of pageantry,
of processions, a sort of grand ritual, with their arts and their
religion broadly blended. The very babies joined in it. To see one of
their great annual festivals, with the massed and marching stateliness
of those great mothers, the young women brave and noble, beautiful and
strong; and then the children, taking part as naturally as ours would
frolic round a Christmas tree--it was overpowering in the impression of
joyous, triumphant life.

They had begun at a period when the drama, the dance, music, religion,
and education were all very close together; and instead of developing
them in detached lines, they had kept the connection. Let me try again
to give, if I can, a faint sense of the difference in the life view--the
background and basis on which their culture rested.

Ellador told me a lot about it. She took me to see the children, the
growing girls, the special teachers. She picked out books for me to
read. She always seemed to understand just what I wanted to know, and
how to give it to me.

While Terry and Alima struck sparks and parted--he always madly drawn
to her and she to him--she must have been, or she’d never have stood the
way he behaved--Ellador and I had already a deep, restful feeling, as
if we’d always had one another. Jeff and Celis were happy; there was no
question of that; but it didn’t seem to me as if they had the good times
we did.

Well, here is the Herland child facing life--as Ellador tried to show
it to me. From the first memory, they knew Peace, Beauty, Order, Safety,
Love, Wisdom, Justice, Patience, and Plenty. By “plenty” I mean that the
babies grew up in an environment which met their needs, just as young
fawns might grow up in dewy forest glades and brook-fed meadows. And
they enjoyed it as frankly and utterly as the fawns would.

They found themselves in a big bright lovely world, full of the most
interesting and enchanting things to learn about and to do. The people
everywhere were friendly and polite. No Herland child ever met the
overbearing rudeness we so commonly show to children. They were People,
too, from the first; the most precious part of the nation.

In each step of the rich experience of living, they found the instance
they were studying widen out into contact with an endless range of
common interests. The things they learned were _related_, from the
first; related to one another, and to the national prosperity.

“It was a butterfly that made me a forester,” said Ellador. “I was about
eleven years old, and I found a big purple-and-green butterfly on a low
flower. I caught it, very carefully, by the closed wings, as I had been
told to do, and carried it to the nearest insect teacher”--I made a note
there to ask her what on earth an insect teacher was--“to ask her its
name. She took it from me with a little cry of delight. ‘Oh, you blessed
child,’ she said. ‘Do you like obernuts?’ Of course I liked obernuts,
and said so. It is our best food-nut, you know. ‘This is a female of the
obernut moth,’ she told me. ‘They are almost gone. We have been trying
to exterminate them for centuries. If you had not caught this one, it
might have laid eggs enough to raise worms enough to destroy thousands
of our nut trees--thousands of bushels of nuts--and make years and years
of trouble for us.’

“Everybody congratulated me. The children all over the country were told
to watch for that moth, if there were any more. I was shown the history
of the creature, and an account of the damage it used to do and of how
long and hard our foremothers had worked to save that tree for us. I
grew a foot, it seemed to me, and determined then and there to be a
forester.”

This is but an instance; she showed me many. The big difference was that
whereas our children grow up in private homes and families, with every
effort made to protect and seclude them from a dangerous world, here
they grew up in a wide, friendly world, and knew it for theirs, from the
first.

Their child-literature was a wonderful thing. I could have spent years
following the delicate subtleties, the smooth simplicities with which
they had bent that great art to the service of the child mind.

We have two life cycles: the man’s and the woman’s. To the man there is
growth, struggle, conquest, the establishment of his family, and as much
further success in gain or ambition as he can achieve.

To the woman, growth, the securing of a husband, the subordinate
activities of family life, and afterward such “social” or charitable
interests as her position allows.

Here was but one cycle, and that a large one.

The child entered upon a broad open field of life, in which motherhood
was the one great personal contribution to the national life, and all
the rest the individual share in their common activities. Every girl I
talked to, at any age above babyhood, had her cheerful determination as
to what she was going to be when she grew up.

What Terry meant by saying they had no “modesty” was that this great
life-view had no shady places; they had a high sense of personal
decorum, but no shame--no knowledge of anything to be ashamed of.

Even their shortcomings and misdeeds in childhood never were presented
to them as sins; merely as errors and misplays--as in a game. Some of
them, who were palpably less agreeable than others or who had a real
weakness or fault, were treated with cheerful allowance, as a friendly
group at whist would treat a poor player.

Their religion, you see, was maternal; and their ethics, based on the
full perception of evolution, showed the principle of growth and the
beauty of wise culture. They had no theory of the essential opposition
of good and evil; life to them was growth; their pleasure was in
growing, and their duty also.

With this background, with their sublimated mother-love, expressed in
terms of widest social activity, every phase of their work was modified
by its effect on the national growth. The language itself they had
deliberately clarified, simplified, made easy and beautiful, for the
sake of the children.

This seemed to us a wholly incredible thing: first, that any nation
should have the foresight, the strength, and the persistence to plan
and fulfill such a task; and second, that women should have had so much
initiative. We have assumed, as a matter of course, that women had
none; that only the man, with his natural energy and impatience of
restriction, would ever invent anything.

Here we found that the pressure of life upon the environment develops in
the human mind its inventive reactions, regardless of sex; and further,
that a fully awakened motherhood plans and works without limit, for the
good of the child.

That the children might be most nobly born, and reared in an environment
calculated to allow the richest, freest growth, they had deliberately
remodeled and improved the whole state.

I do not mean in the least that they stopped at that, any more than
a child stops at childhood. The most impressive part of their whole
culture beyond this perfect system of child-rearing was the range of
interests and associations open to them all, for life. But in the field
of literature I was most struck, at first, by the child-motive.

They had the same gradation of simple repetitive verse and story that we
are familiar with, and the most exquisite, imaginative tales; but where,
with us, these are the dribbled remnants of ancient folk myths and
primitive lullabies, theirs were the exquisite work of great artists;
not only simple and unfailing in appeal to the child-mind, but _true_,
true to the living world about them.

To sit in one of their nurseries for a day was to change one’s views
forever as to babyhood. The youngest ones, rosy fatlings in their
mothers’ arms, or sleeping lightly in the flower-sweet air, seemed
natural enough, save that they never cried. I never heard a child cry in
Herland, save once or twice at a bad fall; and then people ran to help,
as we would at a scream of agony from a grown person.

Each mother had her year of glory; the time to love and learn, living
closely with her child, nursing it proudly, often for two years or more.
This perhaps was one reason for their wonderful vigor.

But after the baby-year the mother was not so constantly in attendance,
unless, indeed, her work was among the little ones. She was never
far off, however, and her attitude toward the co-mothers, whose proud
child-service was direct and continuous, was lovely to see.

As for the babies--a group of those naked darlings playing on short
velvet grass, clean-swept; or rugs as soft; or in shallow pools of
bright water; tumbling over with bubbling joyous baby laughter--it was a
view of infant happiness such as I had never dreamed.

The babies were reared in the warmer part of the country, and gradually
acclimated to the cooler heights as they grew older.

Sturdy children of ten and twelve played in the snow as joyfully as ours
do; there were continuous excursions of them, from one part of the land
to another, so that to each child the whole country might be home.

It was all theirs, waiting for them to learn, to love, to use, to serve;
as our own little boys plan to be “a big soldier,” or “a cowboy,” or
whatever pleases their fancy; and our little girls plan for the kind of
home they mean to have, or how many children; these planned, freely and
gaily with much happy chattering, of what they would do for the country
when they were grown.

It was the eager happiness of the children and young people which first
made me see the folly of that common notion of ours--that if life was
smooth and happy, people would not enjoy it.

As I studied these youngsters, vigorous, joyous, eager little creatures,
and their voracious appetite for life, it shook my previous ideas so
thoroughly that they have never been re-established. The steady level of
good health gave them all that natural stimulus we used to call “animal
spirits”--an odd contradiction in terms. They found themselves in an
immediate environment which was agreeable and interesting, and before
them stretched the years of learning and discovery, the fascinating,
endless process of education.

As I looked into these methods and compared them with our own, my
strange uncomfortable sense of race-humility grew apace.

Ellador could not understand my astonishment. She explained things
kindly and sweetly, but with some amazement that they needed explaining,
and with sudden questions as to how we did it that left me meeker than
ever.

I betook myself to Somel one day, carefully not taking Ellador. I did
not mind seeming foolish to Somel--she was used to it.

“I want a chapter of explanation,” I told her. “You know my stupidities
by heart, and I do not want to show them to Ellador--she thinks me so
wise!”

She smiled delightedly. “It is beautiful to see,” she told me, “this
new wonderful love between you. The whole country is interested, you
know--how can we help it!”

I had not thought of that. We say: “All the world loves a lover,” but
to have a couple of million people watching one’s courtship--and that a
difficult one--was rather embarrassing.

“Tell me about your theory of education,” I said. “Make it short and
easy. And, to show you what puzzles me, I’ll tell you that in our theory
great stress is laid on the forced exertion of the child’s mind; we
think it is good for him to overcome obstacles.”

“Of course it is,” she unexpectedly agreed. “All our children do
that--they love to.”

That puzzled me again. If they loved to do it, how could it be
educational?

“Our theory is this,” she went on carefully. “Here is a young human
being. The mind is as natural a thing as the body, a thing that grows,
a thing to use and enjoy. We seek to nourish, to stimulate, to exercise
the mind of a child as we do the body. There are the two main divisions
in education--you have those of course?--the things it is necessary to
know, and the things it is necessary to do.”

“To do? Mental exercises, you mean?”

“Yes. Our general plan is this: In the matter of feeding the mind,
of furnishing information, we use our best powers to meet the natural
appetite of a healthy young brain; not to overfeed it, to provide such
amount and variety of impressions as seem most welcome to each child.
That is the easiest part. The other division is in arranging a properly
graduated series of exercises which will best develop each mind; the
common faculties we all have, and most carefully, the especial faculties
some of us have. You do this also, do you not?”

“In a way,” I said rather lamely. “We have not so subtle and highly
developed a system as you, not approaching it; but tell me more. As
to the information--how do you manage? It appears that all of you know
pretty much everything--is that right?”

This she laughingly disclaimed. “By no means. We are, as you soon found
out, extremely limited in knowledge. I wish you could realize what a
ferment the country is in over the new things you have told us; the
passionate eagerness among thousands of us to go to your country and
learn--learn--learn! But what we do know is readily divisible into
common knowledge and special knowledge. The common knowledge we have
long since learned to feed into the minds of our little ones with no
waste of time or strength; the special knowledge is open to all, as
they desire it. Some of us specialize in one line only. But most take up
several--some for their regular work, some to grow with.”

“To grow with?”

“Yes. When one settles too close in one kind of work there is a tendency
to atrophy in the disused portions of the brain. We like to keep on
learning, always.”

“What do you study?”

“As much as we know of the different sciences. We have, within our
limits, a good deal of knowledge of anatomy, physiology, nutrition--all
that pertains to a full and beautiful personal life. We have our botany
and chemistry, and so on--very rudimentary, but interesting; our own
history, with its accumulating psychology.”

“You put psychology with history--not with personal life?”

“Of course. It is ours; it is among and between us, and it changes with
the succeeding and improving generations. We are at work, slowly and
carefully, developing our whole people along these lines. It is glorious
work--splendid! To see the thousands of babies improving, showing
stronger clearer minds, sweeter dispositions, higher capacities--don’t
you find it so in your country?”

This I evaded flatly. I remembered the cheerless claim that the human
mind was no better than in its earliest period of savagery, only better
informed--a statement I had never believed.

“We try most earnestly for two powers,” Somel continued. “The two that
seem to us basically necessary for all noble life: a clear, far-reaching
judgment, and a strong well-used will. We spend our best efforts, all
through childhood and youth, in developing these faculties, individual
judgment and will.”

“As part of your system of education, you mean?”

“Exactly. As the most valuable part. With the babies, as you may have
noticed, we first provide an environment which feeds the mind without
tiring it; all manner of simple and interesting things to do, as soon
as they are old enough to do them; physical properties, of course, come
first. But as early as possible, going very carefully, not to tax the
mind, we provide choices, simple choices, with very obvious causes and
consequences. You’ve noticed the games?”

I had. The children seemed always playing something; or else, sometimes,
engaged in peaceful researches of their own. I had wondered at first
when they went to school, but soon found that they never did--to their
knowledge. It was all education but no schooling.

“We have been working for some sixteen hundred years, devising better
and better games for children,” continued Somel.

I sat aghast. “Devising games?” I protested. “Making up new ones, you
mean?”

“Exactly,” she answered. “Don’t you?”

Then I remembered the kindergarten, and the “material” devised by
Signora Montessori, and guardedly replied: “To some extent.” But most
of our games, I told her, were very old--came down from child to child,
along the ages, from the remote past.

“And what is their effect?” she asked. “Do they develop the faculties
you wish to encourage?”

Again I remembered the claims made by the advocates of “sports,” and
again replied guardedly that that was, in part, the theory.

“But do the children _like_ it?” I asked. “Having things made up and
set before them that way? Don’t they want the old games?”

“You can see the children,” she answered. “Are yours more
contented--more interested--happier?”

Then I thought, as in truth I never had thought before, of the dull,
bored children I had seen, whining; “What can I do now?”; of the little
groups and gangs hanging about; of the value of some one strong spirit
who possessed initiative and would “start something”; of the children’s
parties and the onerous duties of the older people set to “amuse the
children”; also of that troubled ocean of misdirected activity we call
“mischief,” the foolish, destructive, sometimes evil things done by
unoccupied children.

“No,” said I grimly. “I don’t think they are.”

The Herland child was born not only into a world carefully prepared,
full of the most fascinating materials and opportunities to learn, but
into the society of plentiful numbers of teachers, teachers born and
trained, whose business it was to accompany the children along that, to
us, impossible thing--the royal road to learning.

There was no mystery in their methods. Being adapted to children it was
at least comprehensible to adults. I spent many days with the little
ones, sometimes with Ellador, sometimes without, and began to feel a
crushing pity for my own childhood, and for all others that I had known.

The houses and gardens planned for babies had in them nothing to
hurt--no stairs, no corners, no small loose objects to swallow, no
fire--just a babies’ paradise. They were taught, as rapidly as
feasible, to use and control their own bodies, and never did I see such
sure-footed, steady-handed, clear-headed little things. It was a joy
to watch a row of toddlers learning to walk, not only on a level floor,
but, a little later, on a sort of rubber rail raised an inch or two
above the soft turf or heavy rugs, and falling off with shrieks of
infant joy, to rush back to the end of the line and try again. Surely we
have noticed how children love to get up on something and walk along it!
But we have never thought to provide that simple and inexhaustible form
of amusement and physical education for the young.

Water they had, of course, and could swim even before they walked. If I
feared at first the effects of a too intensive system of culture, that
fear was dissipated by seeing the long sunny days of pure physical
merriment and natural sleep in which these heavenly babies passed their
first years. They never knew they were being educated. They did not
dream that in this association of hilarious experiment and achievement
they were laying the foundation for that close beautiful group feeling
into which they grew so firmly with the years. This was education for
citizenship.

CHAPTER 10.
Their Religions and Our Marriages

It took me a long time, as a man, a foreigner, and a species
of Christian--I was that as much as anything--to get any clear
understanding of the religion of Herland.

Its deification of motherhood was obvious enough; but there was far more
to it than that; or, at least, than my first interpretation of that.

I think it was only as I grew to love Ellador more than I believed
anyone could love anybody, as I grew faintly to appreciate her inner
attitude and state of mind, that I began to get some glimpses of this
faith of theirs.

When I asked her about it, she tried at first to tell me, and then,
seeing me flounder, asked for more information about ours. She soon
found that we had many, that they varied widely, but had some points
in common. A clear methodical luminous mind had my Ellador, not only
reasonable, but swiftly perceptive.

She made a sort of chart, superimposing the different religions as
I described them, with a pin run through them all, as it were; their
common basis being a Dominant Power or Powers, and some Special
Behavior, mostly taboos, to please or placate. There were some common
features in certain groups of religions, but the one always present was
this Power, and the things which must be done or not done because of
it. It was not hard to trace our human imagery of the Divine Force up
through successive stages of bloodthirsty, sensual, proud, and cruel
gods of early times to the conception of a Common Father with its
corollary of a Common Brotherhood.

This pleased her very much, and when I expatiated on the Omniscience,
Omnipotence, Omnipresence, and so on, of our God, and of the loving
kindness taught by his Son, she was much impressed.

The story of the Virgin birth naturally did not astonish her, but she
was greatly puzzled by the Sacrifice, and still more by the Devil, and
the theory of Damnation.

When in an inadvertent moment I said that certain sects had believed in
infant damnation--and explained it--she sat very still indeed.

“They believed that God was Love--and Wisdom--and Power?”

“Yes--all of that.”

Her eyes grew large, her face ghastly pale.

“And yet that such a God could put little new babies to burn--for
eternity?” She fell into a sudden shuddering and left me, running
swiftly to the nearest temple.

Every smallest village had its temple, and in those gracious retreats
sat wise and noble women, quietly busy at some work of their own until
they were wanted, always ready to give comfort, light, or help, to any
applicant.

Ellador told me afterward how easily this grief of hers was assuaged,
and seemed ashamed of not having helped herself out of it.

“You see, we are not accustomed to horrible ideas,” she said, coming
back to me rather apologetically. “We haven’t any. And when we get a
thing like that into our minds it’s like--oh, like red pepper in your
eyes. So I just ran to her, blinded and almost screaming, and she took
it out so quickly--so easily!”

“How?” I asked, very curious.

“‘Why, you blessed child,’ she said, ‘you’ve got the wrong idea
altogether. You do not have to think that there ever was such a God--for
there wasn’t. Or such a happening--for there wasn’t. Nor even that this
hideous false idea was believed by anybody. But only this--that people
who are utterly ignorant will believe anything--which you certainly knew
before.’”

“Anyhow,” pursued Ellador, “she turned pale for a minute when I first
said it.”

This was a lesson to me. No wonder this whole nation of women was
peaceful and sweet in expression--they had no horrible ideas.

“Surely you had some when you began,” I suggested.

“Oh, yes, no doubt. But as soon as our religion grew to any height at
all we left them out, of course.”

From this, as from many other things, I grew to see what I finally put
in words.

“Have you no respect for the past? For what was thought and believed by
your foremothers?”

“Why, no,” she said. “Why should we? They are all gone. They knew less
than we do. If we are not beyond them, we are unworthy of them--and
unworthy of the children who must go beyond us.”

This set me thinking in good earnest. I had always imagined--simply from
hearing it said, I suppose--that women were by nature conservative. Yet
these women, quite unassisted by any masculine spirit of enterprise, had
ignored their past and built daringly for the future.

Ellador watched me think. She seemed to know pretty much what was going
on in my mind.

“It’s because we began in a new way, I suppose. All our folks were
swept away at once, and then, after that time of despair, came those
wonder children--the first. And then the whole breathless hope of us
was for _their_ children--if they should have them. And they did! Then
there was the period of pride and triumph till we grew too numerous;
and after that, when it all came down to one child apiece, we began to
really work--to make better ones.”

“But how does this account for such a radical difference in your
religion?” I persisted.

She said she couldn’t talk about the difference very intelligently,
not being familiar with other religions, but that theirs seemed simple
enough. Their great Mother Spirit was to them what their own motherhood
was--only magnified beyond human limits. That meant that they
felt beneath and behind them an upholding, unfailing, serviceable
love--perhaps it was really the accumulated mother-love of the race they
felt--but it was a Power.

“Just what is your theory of worship?” I asked her.

“Worship? What is that?”

I found it singularly difficult to explain. This Divine Love which they
felt so strongly did not seem to ask anything of them--“any more than
our mothers do,” she said.

“But surely your mothers expect honor, reverence, obedience, from you.
You have to do things for your mothers, surely?”

“Oh, no,” she insisted, smiling, shaking her soft brown hair. “We do
things _from_ our mothers--not _for_ them. We don’t have to do things
_for_ them--they don’t need it, you know. But we have to live
on--splendidly--because of them; and that’s the way we feel about God.”

I meditated again. I thought of that God of Battles of ours,
that Jealous God, that Vengeance-is-mine God. I thought of our
world-nightmare--Hell.

“You have no theory of eternal punishment then, I take it?”

Ellador laughed. Her eyes were as bright as stars, and there were tears
in them, too. She was so sorry for me.

“How could we?” she asked, fairly enough. “We have no punishments in
life, you see, so we don’t imagine them after death.”

“Have you _no_ punishments? Neither for children nor criminals--such
mild criminals as you have?” I urged.

“Do you punish a person for a broken leg or a fever? We have preventive
measures, and cures; sometimes we have to ‘send the patient to bed,’ as
it were; but that’s not a punishment--it’s only part of the treatment,”
 she explained.

Then studying my point of view more closely, she added: “You see, we
recognize, in our human motherhood, a great tender limitless uplifting
force--patience and wisdom and all subtlety of delicate method. We
credit God--our idea of God--with all that and more. Our mothers are not
angry with us--why should God be?”

“Does God mean a person to you?”

This she thought over a little. “Why--in trying to get close to it in
our minds we personify the idea, naturally; but we certainly do
not assume a Big Woman somewhere, who is God. What we call God is a
Pervading Power, you know, an Indwelling Spirit, something inside of us
that we want more of. Is your God a Big Man?” she asked innocently.

“Why--yes, to most of us, I think. Of course we call it an Indwelling
Spirit just as you do, but we insist that it is Him, a Person, and a
Man--with whiskers.”

“Whiskers? Oh yes--because you have them! Or do you wear them because He
does?”

“On the contrary, we shave them off--because it seems cleaner and more
comfortable.”

“Does He wear clothes--in your idea, I mean?”

I was thinking over the pictures of God I had seen--rash advances of the
devout mind of man, representing his Omnipotent Deity as an old man in
a flowing robe, flowing hair, flowing beard, and in the light of her
perfectly frank and innocent questions this concept seemed rather
unsatisfying.

I explained that the God of the Christian world was really the ancient
Hebrew God, and that we had simply taken over the patriarchal idea--that
ancient one which quite inevitably clothed its thought of God with the
attributes of the patriarchal ruler, the grandfather.

“I see,” she said eagerly, after I had explained the genesis and
development of our religious ideals. “They lived in separate groups,
with a male head, and he was probably a little--domineering?”

“No doubt of that,” I agreed.

“And we live together without any ‘head,’ in that sense--just our chosen
leaders--that _does_ make a difference.”

“Your difference is deeper than that,” I assured her. “It is in your
common motherhood. Your children grow up in a world where everybody
loves them. They find life made rich and happy for them by the diffused
love and wisdom of all mothers. So it is easy for you to think of God in
the terms of a similar diffused and competent love. I think you are far
nearer right than we are.”

“What I cannot understand,” she pursued carefully, “is your preservation
of such a very ancient state of mind. This patriarchal idea you tell me
is thousands of years old?”

“Oh yes--four, five, six thousand--every so many.”

“And you have made wonderful progress in those years--in other things?”

“We certainly have. But religion is different. You see, our religions
come from behind us, and are initiated by some great teacher who is
dead. He is supposed to have known the whole thing and taught it,
finally. All we have to do is believe--and obey.”

“Who was the great Hebrew teacher?”

“Oh--there it was different. The Hebrew religion is an accumulation of
extremely ancient traditions, some far older than their people, and grew
by accretion down the ages. We consider it inspired--‘the Word of God.’”

“How do you know it is?”

“Because it says so.”

“Does it say so in as many words? Who wrote that in?”

I began to try to recall some text that did say so, and could not bring
it to mind.

“Apart from that,” she pursued, “what I cannot understand is why you
keep these early religious ideas so long. You have changed all your
others, haven’t you?”

“Pretty generally,” I agreed. “But this we call ‘revealed religion,’
and think it is final. But tell me more about these little temples of
yours,” I urged. “And these Temple Mothers you run to.”

Then she gave me an extended lesson in applied religion, which I will
endeavor to concentrate.

They developed their central theory of a Loving Power, and assumed that
its relation to them was motherly--that it desired their welfare and
especially their development. Their relation to it, similarly, was
filial, a loving appreciation and a glad fulfillment of its high
purposes. Then, being nothing if not practical, they set their keen
and active minds to discover the kind of conduct expected of them. This
worked out in a most admirable system of ethics. The principle of Love
was universally recognized--and used.

Patience, gentleness, courtesy, all that we call “good breeding,” was
part of their code of conduct. But where they went far beyond us was
in the special application of religious feeling to every field of
life. They had no ritual, no little set of performances called “divine
service,” save those religious pageants I have spoken of, and those were
as much educational as religious, and as much social as either. But they
had a clear established connection between everything they did--and
God. Their cleanliness, their health, their exquisite order, the rich
peaceful beauty of the whole land, the happiness of the children, and
above all the constant progress they made--all this was their religion.

They applied their minds to the thought of God, and worked out the
theory that such an inner power demanded outward expression. They lived
as if God was real and at work within them.

As for those little temples everywhere--some of the women were more
skilled, more temperamentally inclined, in this direction, than others.
These, whatever their work might be, gave certain hours to the Temple
Service, which meant being there with all their love and wisdom and
trained thought, to smooth out rough places for anyone who needed it.
Sometimes it was a real grief, very rarely a quarrel, most often a
perplexity; even in Herland the human soul had its hours of darkness.
But all through the country their best and wisest were ready to give
help.

If the difficulty was unusually profound, the applicant was directed to
someone more specially experienced in that line of thought.

Here was a religion which gave to the searching mind a rational basis
in life, the concept of an immense Loving Power working steadily out
through them, toward good. It gave to the “soul” that sense of contact
with the inmost force, of perception of the uttermost purpose, which we
always crave. It gave to the “heart” the blessed feeling of being loved,
loved and _understood_. It gave clear, simple, rational directions as
to how we should live--and why. And for ritual it gave first those
triumphant group demonstrations, when with a union of all the arts,
the revivifying combination of great multitudes moved rhythmically with
march and dance, song and music, among their own noblest products
and the open beauty of their groves and hills. Second, it gave these
numerous little centers of wisdom where the least wise could go to the
most wise and be helped.

“It is beautiful!” I cried enthusiastically. “It is the most practical,
comforting, progressive religion I ever heard of. You _do_ love one
another--you _do_ bear one another’s burdens--you _do_ realize that a
little child is a type of the kingdom of heaven. You are more Christian
than any people I ever saw. But--how about death? And the life
everlasting? What does your religion teach about eternity?”

“Nothing,” said Ellador. “What is eternity?”

What indeed? I tried, for the first time in my life, to get a real hold
on the idea.

“It is--never stopping.”

“Never stopping?” She looked puzzled.

“Yes, life, going on forever.”

“Oh--we see that, of course. Life does go on forever, all about us.”

“But eternal life goes on _without dying_.”

“The same person?”

“Yes, the same person, unending, immortal.” I was pleased to think
that I had something to teach from our religion, which theirs had never
promulgated.

“Here?” asked Ellador. “Never to die--here?” I could see her practical
mind heaping up the people, and hurriedly reassured her.

“Oh no, indeed, not here--hereafter. We must die here, of course, but
then we ‘enter into eternal life.’ The soul lives forever.”

“How do you know?” she inquired.

“I won’t attempt to prove it to you,” I hastily continued. “Let us
assume it to be so. How does this idea strike you?”

Again she smiled at me, that adorable, dimpling, tender, mischievous,
motherly smile of hers. “Shall I be quite, quite honest?”

“You couldn’t be anything else,” I said, half gladly and half a little
sorry. The transparent honesty of these women was a never-ending
astonishment to me.

“It seems to me a singularly foolish idea,” she said calmly. “And if
true, most disagreeable.”

Now I had always accepted the doctrine of personal immortality as
a thing established. The efforts of inquiring spiritualists, always
seeking to woo their beloved ghosts back again, never seemed to me
necessary. I don’t say I had ever seriously and courageously discussed
the subject with myself even; I had simply assumed it to be a fact.
And here was the girl I loved, this creature whose character constantly
revealed new heights and ranges far beyond my own, this superwoman of a
superland, saying she thought immortality foolish! She meant it, too.

“What do you _want_ it for?” she asked.

“How can you _not_ want it!” I protested. “Do you want to go out like a
candle? Don’t you want to go on and on--growing and--and--being happy,
forever?”

“Why, no,” she said. “I don’t in the least. I want my child--and my
child’s child--to go on--and they will. Why should _I_ want to?”

“But it means Heaven!” I insisted. “Peace and Beauty and Comfort
and Love--with God.” I had never been so eloquent on the subject of
religion. She could be horrified at Damnation, and question the justice
of Salvation, but Immortality--that was surely a noble faith.

“Why, Van,” she said, holding out her hands to me. “Why Van--darling!
How splendid of you to feel it so keenly. That’s what we all want, of
course--Peace and Beauty, and Comfort and Love--with God! And Progress
too, remember; Growth, always and always. That is what our religion
teaches us to want and to work for, and we do!”

“But that is _here_,” I said, “only for this life on earth.”

“Well? And do not you in your country, with your beautiful religion of
love and service have it here, too--for this life--on earth?”

None of us were willing to tell the women of Herland about the evils of
our own beloved land. It was all very well for us to assume them to
be necessary and essential, and to criticize--strictly among
ourselves--their all-too-perfect civilization, but when it came to
telling them about the failures and wastes of our own, we never could
bring ourselves to do it.

Moreover, we sought to avoid too much discussion, and to press the
subject of our approaching marriages.

Jeff was the determined one on this score.

“Of course they haven’t any marriage ceremony or service, but we can
make it a sort of Quaker wedding, and have it in the temple--it is the
least we can do for them.”

It was. There was so little, after all, that we could do for them. Here
we were, penniless guests and strangers, with no chance even to use
our strength and courage--nothing to defend them from or protect them
against.

“We can at least give them our names,” Jeff insisted.

They were very sweet about it, quite willing to do whatever we asked, to
please us. As to the names, Alima, frank soul that she was, asked what
good it would do.

Terry, always irritating her, said it was a sign of possession. “You are
going to be Mrs. Nicholson,” he said. “Mrs. T. O. Nicholson. That shows
everyone that you are my wife.”

“What is a ‘wife’ exactly?” she demanded, a dangerous gleam in her eye.

“A wife is the woman who belongs to a man,” he began.

But Jeff took it up eagerly: “And a husband is the man who belongs to
a woman. It is because we are monogamous, you know. And marriage is the
ceremony, civil and religious, that joins the two together--‘until death
do us part,’” he finished, looking at Celis with unutterable devotion.

“What makes us all feel foolish,” I told the girls, “is that here we
have nothing to give you--except, of course, our names.”

“Do your women have no names before they are married?” Celis suddenly
demanded.

“Why, yes,” Jeff explained. “They have their maiden names--their
father’s names, that is.”

“And what becomes of them?” asked Alima.

“They change them for their husbands’, my dear,” Terry answered her.

“Change them? Do the husbands then take the wives’ ‘maiden names’?”

“Oh, no,” he laughed. “The man keeps his own and gives it to her, too.”

“Then she just loses hers and takes a new one--how unpleasant! We won’t
do that!” Alima said decidedly.

Terry was good-humored about it. “I don’t care what you do or don’t do
so long as we have that wedding pretty soon,” he said, reaching a strong
brown hand after Alima’s, quite as brown and nearly as strong.

“As to giving us things--of course we can see that you’d like to, but
we are glad you can’t,” Celis continued. “You see, we love you just for
yourselves--we wouldn’t want you to--to pay anything. Isn’t it enough to
know that you are loved personally--and just as men?”

Enough or not, that was the way we were married. We had a great triple
wedding in the biggest temple of all, and it looked as if most of the
nation was present. It was very solemn and very beautiful. Someone had
written a new song for the occasion, nobly beautiful, about the New Hope
for their people--the New Tie with other lands--Brotherhood as well as
Sisterhood, and, with evident awe, Fatherhood.

Terry was always restive under their talk of fatherhood. “Anybody’d
think we were High Priests of--of Philoprogenitiveness!” he protested.
“These women think of _nothing_ but children, seems to me! We’ll teach
’em!”

He was so certain of what he was going to teach, and Alima so uncertain
in her moods of reception, that Jeff and I feared the worst. We tried to
caution him--much good that did. The big handsome fellow drew himself up
to his full height, lifted that great chest of his, and laughed.

“There are three separate marriages,” he said. “I won’t interfere with
yours--nor you with mine.”

So the great day came, and the countless crowds of women, and we three
bridegrooms without any supporting “best men,” or any other men to back
us up, felt strangely small as we came forward.

Somel and Zava and Moadine were on hand; we were thankful to have them,
too--they seemed almost like relatives.

There was a splendid procession, wreathing dances, the new anthem I
spoke of, and the whole great place pulsed with feeling--the deep awe,
the sweet hope, the wondering expectation of a new miracle.

“There has been nothing like this in the country since our Motherhood
began!” Somel said softly to me, while we watched the symbolic marches.
“You see, it is the dawn of a new era. You don’t know how much you mean
to us. It is not only Fatherhood--that marvelous dual parentage to
which we are strangers--the miracle of union in life-giving--but it is
Brotherhood. You are the rest of the world. You join us to our kind--to
all the strange lands and peoples we have never seen. We hope to know
them--to love and help them--and to learn of them. Ah! You cannot know!”

Thousands of voices rose in the soaring climax of that great Hymn of The
Coming Life. By the great Altar of Motherhood, with its crown of fruit
and flowers, stood a new one, crowned as well. Before the Great Over
Mother of the Land and her ring of High Temple Counsellors, before that
vast multitude of calm-faced mothers and holy-eyed maidens, came forward
our own three chosen ones, and we, three men alone in all that land,
joined hands with them and made our marriage vows.

CHAPTER 11.
Our Difficulties

We say, “Marriage is a lottery”; also “Marriages are made in
Heaven”--but this is not so widely accepted as the other.

We have a well-founded theory that it is best to marry “in one’s class,”
 and certain well-grounded suspicions of international marriages, which
seem to persist in the interests of social progress, rather than in
those of the contracting parties.

But no combination of alien races, of color, of caste, or creed, was
ever so basically difficult to establish as that between us, three
modern American men, and these three women of Herland.

It is all very well to say that we should have been frank about it
beforehand. We had been frank. We had discussed--at least Ellador and
I had--the conditions of The Great Adventure, and thought the path
was clear before us. But there are some things one takes for granted,
supposes are mutually understood, and to which both parties may
repeatedly refer without ever meaning the same thing.

The differences in the education of the average man and woman are
great enough, but the trouble they make is not mostly for the man; he
generally carries out his own views of the case. The woman may have
imagined the conditions of married life to be different; but what she
imagined, was ignorant of, or might have preferred, did not seriously
matter.

I can see clearly and speak calmly about this now, writing after a lapse
of years, years full of growth and education, but at the time it was
rather hard sledding for all of us--especially for Terry. Poor Terry!
You see, in any other imaginable marriage among the peoples of the
earth, whether the woman were black, red, yellow, brown, or white;
whether she were ignorant or educated, submissive or rebellious, she
would have behind her the marriage tradition of our general history.
This tradition relates the woman to the man. He goes on with his
business, and she adapts herself to him and to it. Even in citizenship,
by some strange hocus-pocus, that fact of birth and geography was waved
aside, and the woman automatically acquired the nationality of her
husband.

Well--here were we, three aliens in this land of women. It was small in
area, and the external differences were not so great as to astound us.
We did not yet appreciate the differences between the race-mind of this
people and ours.

In the first place, they were a “pure stock” of two thousand
uninterrupted years. Where we have some long connected lines of
thought and feeling, together with a wide range of differences, often
irreconcilable, these people were smoothly and firmly agreed on most of
the basic principles of their life; and not only agreed in principle,
but accustomed for these sixty-odd generations to act on those
principles.

This is one thing which we did not understand--had made no allowance
for. When in our pre-marital discussions one of those dear girls had
said: “We understand it thus and thus,” or “We hold such and such to be
true,” we men, in our own deep-seated convictions of the power of love,
and our easy views about beliefs and principles, fondly imagined that
we could convince them otherwise. What we imagined, before marriage, did
not matter any more than what an average innocent young girl imagines.
We found the facts to be different.

It was not that they did not love us; they did, deeply and warmly. But
there are you again--what they meant by “love” and what we meant by
“love” were so different.

Perhaps it seems rather cold-blooded to say “we” and “they,” as if we
were not separate couples, with our separate joys and sorrows, but our
positions as aliens drove us together constantly. The whole strange
experience had made our friendship more close and intimate than it would
ever have become in a free and easy lifetime among our own people.
Also, as men, with our masculine tradition of far more than two thousand
years, we were a unit, small but firm, against this far larger unit of
feminine tradition.

I think I can make clear the points of difference without a too painful
explicitness. The more external disagreement was in the matter of “the
home,” and the housekeeping duties and pleasures we, by instinct and
long education, supposed to be inherently appropriate to women.

I will give two illustrations, one away up, and the other away down, to
show how completely disappointed we were in this regard.

For the lower one, try to imagine a male ant, coming from some state of
existence where ants live in pairs, endeavoring to set up housekeeping
with a female ant from a highly developed anthill. This female ant might
regard him with intense personal affection, but her ideas of parentage
and economic management would be on a very different scale from his.
Now, of course, if she was a stray female in a country of pairing ants,
he might have had his way with her; but if he was a stray male in an
anthill--!

For the higher one, try to imagine a devoted and impassioned man trying
to set up housekeeping with a lady angel, a real wings-and-harp-and-halo
angel, accustomed to fulfilling divine missions all over interstellar
space. This angel might love the man with an affection quite beyond his
power of return or even of appreciation, but her ideas of service and
duty would be on a very different scale from his. Of course, if she was
a stray angel in a country of men, he might have had his way with her;
but if he was a stray man among angels--!

Terry, at his worst, in a black fury for which, as a man, I must have
some sympathy, preferred the ant simile. More of Terry and his special
troubles later. It was hard on Terry.

Jeff--well, Jeff always had a streak that was too good for this world!
He’s the kind that would have made a saintly priest in parentagearlier
times. He accepted the angel theory, swallowed it whole, tried to force
it on us--with varying effect. He so worshipped Celis, and not only
Celis, but what she represented; he had become so deeply convinced of
the almost supernatural advantages of this country and people, that he
took his medicine like a--I cannot say “like a man,” but more as if he
wasn’t one.

Don’t misunderstand me for a moment. Dear old Jeff was no milksop or
molly-coddle either. He was a strong, brave, efficient man, and an
excellent fighter when fighting was necessary. But there was always this
angel streak in him. It was rather a wonder, Terry being so different,
that he really loved Jeff as he did; but it happens so sometimes, in
spite of the difference--perhaps because of it.

As for me, I stood between. I was no such gay Lothario as Terry, and no
such Galahad as Jeff. But for all my limitations I think I had the habit
of using my brains in regard to behavior rather more frequently than
either of them. I had to use brain-power now, I can tell you.

The big point at issue between us and our wives was, as may easily be
imagined, in the very nature of the relation.

“Wives! Don’t talk to me about wives!” stormed Terry. “They don’t know
what the word means.”

Which is exactly the fact--they didn’t. How could they? Back in their
prehistoric records of polygamy and slavery there were no ideals of
wifehood as we know it, and since then no possibility of forming such.

“The only thing they can think of about a man is _Fatherhood!_” said
Terry in high scorn. “_Fatherhood!_ As if a man was always wanting to
be a _father!_”

This also was correct. They had their long, wide, deep, rich experience
of Motherhood, and their only perception of the value of a male creature
as such was for Fatherhood.

Aside from that, of course, was the whole range of personal love, love
which as Jeff earnestly phrased it “passeth the love of women!” It did,
too. I can give no idea--either now, after long and happy experience of
it, or as it seemed then, in the first measureless wonder--of the beauty
and power of the love they gave us.

Even Alima--who had a more stormy temperament than either of the others,
and who, heaven knows, had far more provocation--even Alima was patience
and tenderness and wisdom personified to the man she loved, until
he--but I haven’t got to that yet.

These, as Terry put it, “alleged or so-called wives” of ours, went right
on with their profession as foresters. We, having no special learnings,
had long since qualified as assistants. We had to do something, if only
to pass the time, and it had to be work--we couldn’t be playing forever.

This kept us out of doors with those dear girls, and more or less
together--too much together sometimes.

These people had, it now became clear to us, the highest, keenest, most
delicate sense of personal privacy, but not the faintest idea of that
_solitude à deux_ we are so fond of. They had, every one of them, the
“two rooms and a bath” theory realized. From earliest childhood each
had a separate bedroom with toilet conveniences, and one of the marks
of coming of age was the addition of an outer room in which to receive
friends.

Long since we had been given our own two rooms apiece, and as being of a
different sex and race, these were in a separate house. It seemed to be
recognized that we should breathe easier if able to free our minds in
real seclusion.

For food we either went to any convenient eating-house, ordered a meal
brought in, or took it with us to the woods, always and equally good.
All this we had become used to and enjoyed--in our courting days.

After marriage there arose in us a somewhat unexpected urge of feeling
that called for a separate house; but this feeling found no response in
the hearts of those fair ladies.

“We _are_ alone, dear,” Ellador explained to me with gentle patience.
“We are alone in these great forests; we may go and eat in any little
summer-house--just we two, or have a separate table anywhere--or even
have a separate meal in our own rooms. How could we be aloner?”

This was all very true. We had our pleasant mutual solitude about our
work, and our pleasant evening talks in their apartments or ours; we
had, as it were, all the pleasures of courtship carried right on; but we
had no sense of--perhaps it may be called possession.

“Might as well not be married at all,” growled Terry. “They only got up
that ceremony to please us--please Jeff, mostly. They’ve no real idea of
being married.”

I tried my best to get Ellador’s point of view, and naturally I tried to
give her mine. Of course, what we, as men, wanted to make them see was
that there were other, and as we proudly said “higher,” uses in this
relation than what Terry called “mere parentage.” In the highest terms I
knew I tried to explain this to Ellador.

“Anything higher than for mutual love to hope to give life, as we did?”
 she said. “How is it higher?”

“It develops love,” I explained. “All the power of beautiful permanent
mated love comes through this higher development.”

“Are you sure?” she asked gently. “How do you know that it was so
developed? There are some birds who love each other so that they mope
and pine if separated, and never pair again if one dies, but they never
mate except in the mating season. Among your people do you find high and
lasting affection appearing in proportion to this indulgence?”

It is a very awkward thing, sometimes, to have a logical mind.

Of course I knew about those monogamous birds and beasts too, that mate
for life and show every sign of mutual affection, without ever having
stretched the sex relationship beyond its original range. But what of
it?

“Those are lower forms of life!” I protested. “They have no capacity
for faithful and affectionate, and apparently happy--but oh, my dear! my
dear!--what can they know of such a love as draws us together? Why, to
touch you--to be near you--to come closer and closer--to lose myself in
you--surely you feel it too, do you not?”

I came nearer. I seized her hands.

Her eyes were on mine, tender radiant, but steady and strong. There was
something so powerful, so large and changeless, in those eyes that
I could not sweep her off her feet by my own emotion as I had
unconsciously assumed would be the case.

It made me feel as, one might imagine, a man might feel who loved a
goddess--not a Venus, though! She did not resent my attitude, did not
repel it, did not in the least fear it, evidently. There was not a shade
of that timid withdrawal or pretty resistance which are so--provocative.

“You see, dearest,” she said, “you have to be patient with us. We are
not like the women of your country. We are Mothers, and we are People,
but we have not specialized in this line.”

“We” and “we” and “we”--it was so hard to get her to be personal. And,
as I thought that, I suddenly remembered how we were always criticizing