 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 Elima, 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. Being in it all the time, asked Elidor, not in prison surely, of course not, living there, naturally, he answered. What does she do there all the time, Elima 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 Elidor, 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? Elima had her notebook out now, and a rather firm set of lip. Terry began to dodge. There's 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 rung 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 Elima, 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, Elador concluded. We are only half a people. We have our women 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 Elima, 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, which 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 Elador'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 women's greatest charm. I shook my head pittingly. 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 us pitched over the cliffs the first day we lit among them, if they hadn't that. There were 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 goodwill 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. Peace was a civilization in which the initial difficulties had long since been overcome. The untroubled peace, the unmeasured plenty, the steady health, the large goodwill 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 in 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 her land. Sex 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 around 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. Elador 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 never have stood the way he behaved, Elador and I had already a deep restful feeling, as if we'd always had one another. If and Seelis 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's the Hurland child facing life, as Elador 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, 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 Hurland 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 Elador. I was about eleven years old, and I found a big purple and green butterfly in 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 overnuts? Of course I liked overnuts, and said so. It is our best food nut, you know. This is a female of the overnut 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 to destroy thousands of our nut trees, thousands of bushels of nuts, and make years and years of trouble for us. Everyone 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 become 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 afterwards 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 shares 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 West 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 wasn't 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 so much initiative. We have assumed, as a matter of course, that women had none, but only the man, with his natural energy and in patience 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 childrearing, was the range of interest in 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. Who sit in one of their nurseries for a day was to change one's views for ever as to babyhood. The youngest ones, rosy fatlings in their mother's arms, or sleeping lightly in the flower-sweet air, seemed natural enough save that they never cried. I never heard a child cry in her land, 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 planned to be a big soldier, or a cowboy, or whatever pleases their fancy, and our little girls planned 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 reestablished. 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 a pace. Elador 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 Somal one day, carefully not taking Elador. I did not mind seeming foolish to Somal. 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 Elador. 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, a furnishing information, we use our best powers to meet the natural appetite of a healthy young brain, not to overfeed it, to provide such a mount 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 special 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, so will continued. The two that seemed 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, engaged in peaceful researches of their own. I had wondered at first when they went to school, but soon found out that they never did, to their knowledge. It was all education, but no schooling. We have been working for some 1,600 years, devising better and better games for children, continued Somal. 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 Senora 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 hurlain 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 Elador, 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 baby's 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. 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 her land. 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 Elador 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 Elador 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 behaviour, 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. Elador 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 Elador. 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 and 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. Elador 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's 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. Elador 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 lived 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, ever so many. And you have made wonderful progress in those years and 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've changed all your others, haven't you? 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 patterns 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. As 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 her land 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, a 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. And it gave these numerous little centres 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 realise 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 Elador. 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 Elador, 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 super land, 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 her land 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 could never 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, Saul 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, the civil and religious, that joins the two together, until death do us part. He finished, looking at Celas 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? Celas 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 changed 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-humoured 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, Celas 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. We think we were high priests of fellow progenitiveness, he protested. These women think of nothing but children, seems to me, will teach them. He was so certain of what he was going to teach, and Alima so uncertain in her moods of perception, 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. These 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. Somal and Zava and Moedin 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 new miracle. There has been nothing like this in the country since our motherhood began, Somal 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 marvellous dual-parentage to which we are strangers, the miracle of union and 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. 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 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 her land. 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 Elador 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 waived 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 an 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 premarital 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 young innocent 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 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, endeavouring to set up housekeeping with a female ant from a highly developed ant hill. 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 ant hill. 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 parentage earlier times. He accepted the angel theory, swallowed it whole, tried to force it on us, with varying effect. He so worshipped Celus, and not only Celus, 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 milk-sob or molly-cattle 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 lethario as Terry, and no such gala-head 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-pointed 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 waithhood 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, for ever. 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 adieu we are so fond of. They had, every one of them, the two rooms in 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 breed 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. Elador 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, too, or have a separate table anywhere, or even have a separate meal in our own rooms. How could we be a loner? This was all very true. We had our pleasant future solitude about our work, and our pleasant evening talks in their apartments are 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 Elador'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 Elador. Anything higher than for mutual love to hope to give life as we did, she said. How is it higher? What 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! 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 was 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 our women for being so personal. Then I did my earnest best to picture to her the sweet, intense joy of married lovers, and the result in higher stimulus to all creative work. Do you mean—she asked quite calmly, as if I was not holding her cool, firm hands in my hot, and rather quivering ones—that with you, when people marry, they go right on doing this in season and out of season, with no thought of children at all? They do, I said, with some bitterness. They are not mere parents. They are men and women, and they love each other. How long? asked Elador, rather unexpectedly. How long? I repeated, a little dashed. Why as long as they live? There is something very beautiful in the idea, she admitted, still as if she were discussing life on Mars. This climactic expression, which, in all the other life-forms, has but the one purpose, has with you become specialized to higher, purer, nobler uses. It has, I judge from what you tell me, the most ennobling effect on character. People marry, not only for parentage, but for this exquisite interchange, and as a result you have a world full of continuous lovers, ardent, happy, mutually devoted, always living on that high tide of supreme emotion, which we had supposed to belong only to one season and one use, and you say it has other results, stimulating all high creative work. That must mean floods, oceans of such work, blossoming from this intense happiness of every married pair. It is a beautiful idea. She was silent, thinking. So was I. She slipped one hand free, and was stroking my hair with it in a gentle motherly way. I bowed my hot head on her shoulder, and felt a dim sense of peace, arrestfulness, which was very pleasant. "'You must take me there some day, darling,' she was saying, "'it is not only that I love you so much, I want to see your country, your people, your mother,' she paused reverently. "'Oh, how I shall love your mother.' I had not been in love many times. My experience did not compare with Terry's. But such as I had was so different from this, that I was perplexed, and full of mixed feelings. Partly a growing sense of common ground between us, a pleasant, rested, calm feeling, which I had imagined could only be attained in one way, and partly a bewildered resentment because what I found was not what I had looked for. It was their confounded psychology. Here they were with this profound, highly developed system of education so bred into them, that even if they were not teachers by profession, they all had a general proficiency in it. It was second nature to them. And no child, stormily demanding a cookie between meals, was ever more subtly diverted into an interest in house-building, than was I when I found an apparently imperative demand had disappeared without my noticing it. And all the time those tender mother eyes, those keen scientific eyes noting every condition and circumstance and learning how to take time by the forelock and avoid discussion before occasion arose. I was amazed at the results. I found that much, very much, of what I had honestly supposed to be physiological necessity was a psychological necessity, or so believed. I found, after my ideas of what was essential had changed, that my feelings changed also. And more than all, I found this, a factor of enormous weight. These women were not provocative. That made an immense difference. The thing that Terry had so complained of when we first came, that they weren't feminine, they lacked charm, now became a great comfort. Their vigorous beauty was an aesthetic pleasure, not an irritant. Their dress and ornaments had not a touch of the, come and find me, element. Even with my own Elador, my wife, who had for a time unveiled a woman's heart and faced the strange new hope and joy of dual parentage, she afterward withdrew again into the same good comrade she had been at first. They were women, plus, and so much plus, that when they did not choose to let the woman disappear, you could not find it anywhere. I don't say it was easy for me. It wasn't. But when I made appeal to her sympathies, I came up against another immovable wall. She was sorry, honestly sorry, for my distresses, and made all manner of thoughtful suggestions, often quite useful, as well as the wise foresight I have mentioned above, which often saved all difficulty before it arose, but her sympathy did not alter her convictions. If I thought it was really right and necessary, I could perhaps bring myself to it, for your sake, dear, but I do not want to, not at all. You would not have a mere submission, would you? That is not the kind of high-romantic love you spoke of, surely? It is a pity, of course, that you should have to adjust your highly specialized faculties to our unspecialized ones. Confounded. I hadn't married the nation, and I told her so. But she only smiled at her own limitations, and explained that she had to think in wheeze. Confounded again. Here I'd have all my energies focused on one wish, and before I knew it she'd have them dissipated in one direction or another, some subject of discussion that began just at the point I was talking about, and ended miles away. It must not be imagined that I was just repelled, ignored, left to cherish a grievance. Not at all. My happiness was in the hands of a larger, sweeter womanhood than I had ever imagined. Before our marriage my own ardor had perhaps blinded me to much of this. I was madly in love with not so much what was there, as with what I supposed to be there. Now I found an endlessly beautiful undiscovered country to explore, and in it the sweetest wisdom and understanding. It was as if I had come to some new place and people, with a desire to eat at all hours, and no other interest in particular, and as if my hosts, instead of merely saying, you shall not eat, had presently aroused in me a lively desire for music, for pictures, for games, for exercise, for playing in the water, for running some ingenious machine, and in the multitude of my satisfactions, I forgot the one point which was not satisfied, and got along very well until mealtime. One of the cleverest and most ingenious of these tricks was only clear to me many years after, when we were so wholly at one on this subject, that I could laugh at my own predicament then. It was this. You see, with us, women are kept as different as possible, and as feminine as possible. We men have our own world, with only men in it. We get tired of our ultra-male-ness, and turn gladly to the ultra-female-ness. Also in keeping our women as feminine as possible, we see to it that when we turn to them we find the thing we want always in evidence. Well, the atmosphere of this place was anything but seductive. The very numbers of these human women, always in human relation, made them anything but alluring. When in spite of this my hereditary instincts and race traditions made me long for the feminine response in Elador, instead of withdrawing so that I should want her more, she deliberately gave me a little too much of her society, always de-feminized as it were. It was awfully funny, really. Here was I, with an ideal in mind, for which I hotly longed, and here was she, deliberately obtruding in the foreground of my consciousness a fact, a fact which I coolly enjoyed, but which actually interfered with what I wanted. I see now clearly enough why a certain kind of man, like Sir Almroth Wright, resents the professional development of women. It gets in the way of the sex ideal. It temporarily covers and excludes femininity. Of course in this case I was so fond of Elador my friend, of Elador my professional companion, that I necessarily enjoyed her society on any terms. Only when I had had her with me in her de-feminine capacity for a sixteen-hour day I could go to my own room and sleep without dreaming about her. The witch! If ever anybody worked to woo and win and hold a human soul, she did, great superwoman that she was. I couldn't then half comprehend the skill of it, the wonder, but this I soon began to find, that under all our cultivated attitude of mind toward women, there is an older, deeper, more natural feeling, the restful reverence which looks up to the mother's sex. So we grew together in friendship and happiness, Elador and I, and so did Jeff and Celis. When it comes to Terry's part of it, and Aleema's, I'm sorry, and I'm ashamed. Of course I blame her somewhat. She wasn't as fine a psychologist as Elador, and what's more, I think she had a far-descended atavistic trace of more marked femaleness, never apparent till Terry called it out. But when all is said it doesn't excuse him. I hadn't realized to the full Terry's character. I couldn't, being a man. The position was the same as with us, of course, only with these distinctions. Aleema, a shade more alluring, and several shades less able as a practical psychologist. Terry a hundredfold more demanding, and proportionately less reasonable. Things grew strained very soon between them. I fancy at first, when they were together, in her great hope of parentage and his keen joy of conquest, that Terry was inconsiderate. In fact, I know it, from things he said. You needn't talk to me, he snapped at Jeff one day, just before our weddings. There never was a woman yet that did not enjoy being mastered. All your pretty talk doesn't amount to a hill of beans, I know. And Terry would hum. I've taken my fun, where I found it, I've robed and I've ranged in my time. And the things that I learned from the yellow and black, they have helped me a heap with the white. Jeff turned sharply and left him at the time. I was a bit disquieted myself. Poor old Terry, the things he'd learned didn't help him a heap in her land. His idea was to take. He thought that was the way. He thought, he honestly believed, that women like it. Not the women of her land, not Aleema. I can see her now, one day in the very first week of their marriage, setting forth to her day's work with long-determined strides and hard-set mouth, and sticking close to Elador. She didn't wish to be alone with Terry. You could see that. But the more she kept away from him, the more he wanted her, naturally. He made a tremendous row about their separate establishments, tried to keep her in his rooms, tried to stay in hers. But there she drew the line sharply. He came away one night and stamped up and down the moonlit road, swearing under his breath. I was taking a walk that night, too, but I wasn't in his state of mind. To hear him rage you'd not have believed that he loved Aleema at all. You'd have thought that she was some quarry he was pursuing, something to catch and conquer. I think that, owing to all those differences I spoke of, they soon lost the common ground they had at first, and were unable to meet sanely and dispassionately. I fancy, too—this is pure conjecture—that he had succeeded in driving Aleema beyond her best judgment, her real conscience, and that after that her own sense of shame, the reaction of the thing made her bitter, perhaps. They quarreled, really quarreled, and after making it up once or twice, they seemed to come to a real break. She would not be alone with him, at all. And perhaps she was a bit nervous, I don't know, but she got Moedine to come and stay next door to her. Also she had a sturdy assistant detail to accompany her in her work. Terry had his own ideas, as I've tried to show. I daresay he thought he had a right to do as he did. Perhaps he even convinced himself that it would be better for her. Anyhow, he hid himself in her bedroom one night. The women of her land have no fear of men. Why should they have? They are not timid in any sense. They are not weak. And they all have strong, trained, athletic bodies. Othello could not have extinguished Aleema with a pillow, as if she were a mouse. They put in practice his pet conviction that a woman loves to be mastered, and by sheer brute force, in all the pride and passion of his intense masculinity, he tried to master this woman. It did not work. I got a pretty clear account a bit later from Elador, but what we heard at the time was the noise of a tremendous struggle, and Aleema calling to Moedine. Moedine was close by and came but once, one or two more strong grave women followed. Every dashed about like a madman. He would cheerfully have killed them, he told me that himself, but he couldn't. When he swung a chair over his head, one sprang in the air and caught it, two threw themselves bodily upon him and forced him to the floor. It was only the work of a few moments to have him tied hand and foot, and then, in sheer pity for his futile rage, to anesthetize him. Aleema was in a cold fury. She wanted him killed, actually. There was a trial before the local over-mother, and this woman, who did not enjoy being mastered, stated her case. In a court in our country he would have been held quite within his rights, of course. But this was not our country, it was theirs. They seemed to measure the enormity of the offence by its effect upon a possible fatherhood, and he scorned even to reply to this way of putting it. He did let himself go once, and explained in definite terms that they were incapable of understanding a man's needs, a man's desires, a man's point of view. He called them neuters, episcenes, bloodless, sexless creatures. He said they could, of course, kill him, as so many insects could, but that he despised them nonetheless. And all those stern, grave mothers did not seem to mind his despising them, not in the least. It was a long trial, and many interesting points were brought out as to their views of our habits, and after a while Terry had his sentence. He waited, grim and defiant. The sentence was, you must go home. End of CHAPTER XI. CHAPTER XII. OF HERLAND. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. CHAPTER XII. We had all meant to go home again. Indeed we had not meant, not by any means, to stay as long as we had. But when it came to being turned out, dismissed, sent away for bad conduct, we none of us really liked it. Terry said he did. He professed great scorn of the penalty in the trial, as well as all the other characteristics of this miserable half-country. But he knew, and we knew, that in any whole country we should never have been as forgivingly treated as we had been here. If the people had come after us according to the directions we left, there had been quite a different story, said Terry. We found out later why no reserve party had arrived. All our careful directions had been destroyed in a fire. We might have all died there, and no one at home have ever known our whereabouts. Terry was under guard now, all the time, known as unsafe, convicted of what was to them an unpardonable sin. He laughed at their chill horror. Parcel of old maids, he called them. They're all old maids, children or not. They don't know the first thing about sex. When Terry said sex, sex with a very large S, he meant the male sex, naturally, its special values, its profound conviction of being the life force, its cheerful ignoring of the true life process, and its interpretation of the other sex solely from its own point of view. I had learned to see these things very differently since living with Ellador, and as for Jeff, he was so thoroughly hurlandized that he wasn't fair to Terry, who fretted sharply in his new restraint. Moedine, grave and strong, as sadly patient as a mother with a degenerate child, kept steady watch on him, with enough other women close at hand to prevent an outbreak. He had no weapons, and well knew that all his strength was of small avail against those grim, quiet women. We were allowed to visit him freely, but he had only his room and a small high-walled garden to walk in, while the preparations for our departure were under way. Three of us were to go. Terry, because he must, I, because two were safer for our flyer, and long boat trip to the coast, Ellador, because she would not let me go without her. If Jeff had elected to return, Celis would have gone too, they were the most absorbed of lovers, but Jeff had no desire that way. Why should I want to go back to all our noise and dirt, our vice and crime, our disease and degeneracy, he demanded of me privately? We never spoke like that before the women. I wouldn't take Celis there for anything on earth, he protested. She'd die. She'd die of horror and shame to see our slums and hospitals. How can you risk it with Ellador? You'd better break it to her gently before she really makes up her mind. Jeff was right. I ought to have told her more fully than I did, of all the things we had to be ashamed of. But it is very hard to bridge the gulf of as deep a difference as existed between our life and theirs. I tried to. Talk here, my dear, I said to her. If you are really going to my country with me, you've got to be prepared for a good many shocks. It's not as beautiful as this. The cities I mean, the civilized parts, of course the wild country is. I shall enjoy it all, she said, her eyes starry with hope. I understand it's not like ours. I can see how monotonous our quiet life must seem to you. How much more stirring yours must be. It must be like the biological change you told me about, when the second sex was introduced, a far greater movement, constant change with new possibilities of growth. I had told her of the later biological theories of sex, and she was deeply convinced of the superior advantages of having two—the superiority of a world with men in it. We have done what we could alone. Perhaps we have some things better in a quiet way. But you have the whole world, all the people of the different nations, all the long, rich history behind you, all the wonderful new knowledge. Oh, I just can't wait to see it. What could I do? I told her in so many words that we had our unsolved problems, that we had dishonesty and corruption, vice and crime, disease and insanity, prisons and hospitals, and it made no more impression on her than it would to tell the South Sea Islander about the temperature of the Arctic circle. She could intellectually see that it was bad to have those things, but she could not feel it. We had quite easily come to accept that her land life is normal, because it was normal. None of us make any outcry over mere health and peace and happy industry, and the abnormal, to which we are all so sadly well acclimated, she had never seen. The two things she cared most to hear about and wanted most to see were these, the beautiful relation of marriage and the lovely women who were mothers and nothing else, beyond these her keen, active mind hungered eagerly for the world life. I'm almost as anxious to go as you are yourself," she insisted, and you must be desperately homesick. I assured her that no one could be homesick in such a paradise as theirs, but she would have none of it. Oh, yes, I know. It's like those little tropical islands you've told me about, shining like jewels in the big blue sea. I can't wait to see the sea. The little island may be as perfect as a garden, but you always want to get back to your own big country, don't you? Even if it is bad in some ways. Elador was more than willing, but the nearer it came to our really going, and to my having to take her back to our civilization, after the clean peace and beauty of theirs, the more I began to dread it, and the more I tried to explain. Of course I had been homesick at first, while we were prisoners, before I had Elador, and of course I had at first rather idealized my country and its ways in describing it. Also I had always accepted certain evils as integral parts of our civilization, and never dwelt on them at all. Even when I tried to tell her the worst, I never remembered some things, which, when she came to see them, impressed her at once, as they had never impressed me. Now in my efforts at explanation I began to see both ways more keenly than I had before, to see the painful defects of my own land, the marvelous gains of this. In missing men, we three visitors, had naturally missed the larger part of life, and had unconsciously assumed that they must miss it too. It took me a long time to realize, Terry never did realize, how little it meant to them. When we say men, man, manly, manhood, and all the other masculine derivatives, we have in the background of our minds a huge, vague, crowded picture of the world and all its activities. To grow up and be a man, to act like a man, the meaning and connotation is wide indeed. That vast background is full of marching columns of men, of changing lines of men, of long processions of men, of men steering their ships into new seas, exploring unknown mountains, breaking horses, herding cattle, plowing and sewing and reaping, toiling at the forge and furnace, digging in the mine, building roads and bridges and high cathedrals, managing great businesses, teaching in all the colleges, preaching in all the churches, of men everywhere doing everything, the world. And when we say women, we think female, the sex. But to these women, in the unbroken sweep of this 2,000-year-old feminine civilization, the word woman called up all that big background, so far as they had gone in social development. And the word man meant to them only male, the sex. Of course, we could tell them that in our world men did everything, but that did not alter the background of their minds. That man, the male, did all these things was to them a statement, making no more change in the point of view than was made in ours when we first faced the astounding fact, to us, that in her land women were the world. We had been living there more than a year. We had learned their limited history, with its straight, smooth, up-reaching lines, reaching higher and going faster up to the smooth comfort of their present life. We had learned a little of their psychology, a much wider field than the history. But here we could not follow so readily. We were now well used to seeing women not as females, but as people, people of all sorts, doing every kind of work. This outbreak of terries, and the strong reaction against it, gave us a new light on their genuine femininity. This was given me with great clearness by both Elador and Sommel. The feeling was the same, sick, revulsion, and horror, such as would be felt at some climactic blasphemy. They had no faintest approach to such a thing in their minds, knowing nothing of the custom of marital indulgence among us. To them the one high purpose of motherhood had been for so long the governing law of life, and the contribution of the father, though known to them, so distinctly another method to the same end, that they could not, with all their effort, get the point of view of the male creature whose desires quite ignore parentage, and seek only for what be euphoniously termed the joys of love. When I tried to tell Elador that women too felt so with us, she drew away from me, and tried hard to grasp intellectually what she could in no way sympathize with. You mean that with you, love between man and woman expresses itself in that way, without regard to motherhood? To parentage, I mean," she added carefully. Yes, surely, it is love we think of, the deep, sweet love between two. Of course we want children, and children come, but that is not what we think about. But it seems so against nature, she said. None of the creatures we know do that. Do other animals in your country. We are not animals, I replied with some sharpness. At least we are something more, something higher. This is a far nobler and more beautiful relation, as I have explained before. Your view seems to us rather, shall I say, practical, prosaic, merely a means to an end. With us, oh my dear girl, cannot you see, cannot you feel? It is the last, sweetest, highest consummation of mutual love. She was impressed visibly. She trembled in my arms as I held her close, kissing her hungrily. But there rose in her eyes that look I knew so well, that remote, clear look as if she had gone far away, even though I held her beautiful body so close, and was now on some snowy mountain regarding me from a distance. I feel it quite clearly, she said to me. It gives me a deep sympathy with what you feel, no doubt more strongly still. But what I feel, even what you feel, dearest, does not convince me that it is right. Until I am sure of that, of course I cannot do as you wish. Elador at times like this always reminded me of Epictetus. I will put you in prison, said his master. My body, you mean, replied Epictetus calmly. I will cut your head off, said his master. Have I said that my head could not be cut off? A difficult person, Epictetus. What is this miracle by which a woman, even in your arms, may withdraw herself, utterly disappear till what you hold is as inaccessible as the face of a cliff? Be patient with me, dear, she urged sweetly. I know it is hard for you, and I begin to see a little how Terry was so driven to crime. Oh, come, that's a pretty hard word for it. After all, Alima was his wife, you know. I urged, feeling at the moment a sudden burst of sympathy for poor Terry. For a man of his temperament and habits, it must have been an unbearable situation. But Elador, for all her wide intellectual grasp, and the broad sympathy in which their religion trained them, could not make allowance for such, to her, sacrilegious brutality. It was the more difficult to explain to her, because we three, in our constant talks and lectures about the rest of the world, had naturally avoided the seamy side. Not so much from a desire to deceive, but from wishing to put the best foot foremost for our civilization, in the face of the beauty and comfort of theirs. Also, we really thought some things were right, or at least unavoidable, which we could readily see would be repugnant to them, and therefore we did not discuss. Again, there was much of our world's life which we, being used to it, had not noticed as anything worth describing, and still further, there was about these women a colossal innocence upon which many of the things we did say made no impression whatsoever. I am thus explicit about it, because it shows how unexpectedly strong was the impression made upon Elador when she at last entered our civilization. She urged me to be patient, and I was patient. You see, I loved her so much, that even the restrictions she so firmly established left me much happiness. We were lovers, and there is surely delight enough in that. Do not imagine that these young women utterly refused the great new hope, as they called it, that of dual parentage, for that they had agreed to marry us, though the marrying part of it was a concession to our prejudices rather than theirs. To them the process was the holy thing, and they meant to keep it holy. But so far only Celis, her blue eyes swimming in happy tears, her heart lifted with that tide of race motherhood which was their supreme passion, could with ineffable joy and pride announce that she was to be a mother. The new motherhood they called it, and the whole country knew. There was no pleasure, no service, no honour in the land that Celis might not have had. Almost like the breathless reverence with which, two thousand years ago, that dwindling band of women had watched the miracle of virgin birth, was the deep awe and warm expectancy with which they greeted this new miracle of union. All mothers in that land were holy. To them, for long ages, the approach to motherhood has been by the most intense and exquisite love and longing, by the supreme desire the overmastering demand for a child. Every thought they held in connection with the processes of maternity was open to the day, simple yet sacred. Every woman of them placed motherhood not only higher than other duties, but so far higher that there were no other duties, one might almost say. All their wide mutual love, all the subtle interplay of mutual friendship and service, the urge of progressive thought and invention, the deepest religious emotion, every feeling and every act was related to this great central power, to the river of life pouring through them, which made them the bears of the very spirit of God. Of all this I learned more and more, from their books, from talk, especially from Elidor. She was at first, for a brief moment, envious of her friend, a thought she put away from her at once and forever. It is better, she said to me, it is much better that it has not come to me yet, to us that is, for if I am to go with you to your country, we may have adventures by sea and land, as you say, and as in truth we did, and it might not be at all safe for a baby. So we won't try again, dear, till it is safe, will we? This was a hard saying for a very loving husband. Unless, she went on, if one is coming, you will leave me behind, you can come back, you know, and I shall have the child. Then that deep ancient chill of male jealousy of even his own progeny touched my heart. I'd rather have you, Elidor, than all the children in the world, I'd rather have you with me, on your own terms, than not to have you. This was a very stupid saying. Of course I would, for if she wasn't there I should want all of her, and have none of her. But if she went along as a sort of sublimated sister, only much closer and warmer than that really, why I should have all of her but that one thing. And I was beginning to find that Elidor's friendship, Elidor's comradeship, Elidor's sisterly affection, Elidor's perfectly sincere love, nonetheless deep that she held it back on a definite line of reserve, were enough to live on very happily. I find it quite beyond me to describe what this woman was to me. We talk fine things about women, but in our hearts we know that they are very limited beings, most of them. We honour them for their functional powers, even while we dishonour them by our use of it. We honour them for their carefully enforced virtue, even while we show by our own conduct how little we think of that virtue. We value them sincerely for the perverted maternal activities which make our wives the most comfortable of servants, bound to us for life with the wages wholly at our own decision, their whole business outside of the temporary duties of such motherhood as they may achieve, to meet our needs in every way. Oh, we value them all right, in their place. Which place is the home, where they perform that mixture of duties so ably described by Mrs. Josephine Dodge Dascom Bacon, in which the services of a mistress are carefully specified. She is a very clear writer, Mrs. J. D. D. Bacon, and understands her subject from her own point of view. But that combination of industries, while convenient, and in a way economical, does not arouse the kind of emotion commanded by the women of her land. These are women one had to love up, very high up, instead of down. They were not pets, they were not servants, they were not timid, inexperienced, weak. After I got over the jar to my pride, which Jeff, I truly think, never felt, he was a born worshiper, and which Terry never got over, he was quite clear in his ideas of the position of women. I found that loving up was a very good sensation after all. It gave me a queer feeling, way down deep, as of the stirring of some ancient, dim, prehistoric consciousness, a feeling that they were right somehow, that this was the way to feel. It was like coming home to mother. I don't mean the underflannels and doughnuts mother, the fussy person that waits on you and spoils you and doesn't really know you. I mean the feeling that a very little child would have, who had been lost, for ever so long. It was a sense of getting home, of being clean and rested, of safety, and yet freedom, of love that was always there, warm like sunshine in May, not hot like a stove or a feather bed, a love that didn't irritate and didn't smother. I looked at Elador's if I hadn't seen her before. If you won't go, I said, I'll get Terry to the coast and come back alone, you can let me down a rope, and if you will go, why you blessed Wonder Woman, I would rather live with you all my life, like this, than to have any other woman I ever saw, or any number of them, to do as I like with. Will you come? She was keen for coming. So the plans went on. She'd have liked to wait for that marvel of Celis's, but Terry had no such desire. He was crazy to be out of it all. It made him sick, he said, sick, this everlasting mother, mother, mothering. I don't think Terry had what the phrenologists call the lump of phylo-progenitiveness at all well-developed. Morbid one-sided cripples, he called them, even when from his window he could see their splendid vigor and beauty. Even while Moedine, as patient and friendly as if she had never helped Elima to hold and bind him, sat there in the room, the picture of wisdom and serene strength. Sexless, episcene, undeveloped neuters, he went on bitterly. He sounded like Sir Almroth right. Well, it was hard. He was madly in love with Elima, really, more so than he had ever been before, and their tempestuous courtship, quarrels, and reconciliations had fanned the flame. And then when he sought by that supreme conquest, which seemed so natural a thing to that type of man, to force her to love him as her master, to have the sturdy, athletic, furious woman rise up and master him, she and her friends. It was no wonder he raged. Come to think of it, I do not recall a similar case in all history or fiction. Women have killed themselves rather than submit to outrage. They have killed the outrager. They have escaped. Or they have submitted, sometimes seeming to get on very well with the victor afterward. There was that adventure of false sex-dis, for instance, who found Lucrice combing the fleece under the midnight lamp. He threatened, as I remember, that if she did not submit, he would slay her, slay a slave, and place him beside her, and say he found them there. A poor device it always seemed to me. If Mr. Lucrice had asked him how he came to be in his wife's bedroom, overlooking her morals, what could he have said? But the point is, Lucrice submitted, and Alima didn't. She kicked me, confided the embittered prisoner. He had to talk to somebody. I was doubled up with the pain, of course, and she jumped on me and yelled for this old harpy. Moedine couldn't hear him. And they had me trust up in no time. I believe Alima could have done it alone, he added, with reluctant admiration. She's as strong as a horse. And of course, a man's helpless when you hit him like that, no woman with a shade of decency. I had to grin at that, and even Terry did, sourly. He wasn't given to reasoning, but it did strike him that an assault like his rather waved considerations of decency. I'd give a year of my life to have her alone again, he said slowly, his hands clenched till the knuckles were white. But he never did. She left our end of the country entirely, went up into the fir forest on the highest slopes, and stayed there. Before we left he quite desperately longed to see her, but she would not come, and he could not go. They watched him like lynxes. Do lynxes watch any better than mousing cats, I wonder? Well, we had to get the flyer in order, and be sure there was enough fuel left, though Terry said we could glide all right down to that lake once we got started. We'd have gone gladly in a week's time, of course, but there was a great to-do over all the country about Elidore's leaving them. She had interviews with some of the leading ethicists, wise women with still eyes, and with the best of the teachers. There was a stir, a thrill, a deep excitement everywhere. Our teaching about the rest of the world has given them all a sense of isolation, of remoteness, of being a little outlying sample of a country, overlooked and forgotten among the family of nations. We had called it the family of nations, and they liked the phrase immensely. They were deeply aroused on the subject of evolution. Indeed the whole field of natural science drew them irresistibly. Any number of them would have risked everything to go to the strange unknown lands and study, but we could take only one, and it had to be Elidore, naturally. We planned greatly about coming back, about establishing a connecting route by water, about penetrating those vast forests and civilizing, or exterminating, the dangerous savages. That is, we men talked of that last, not with the women. They had a definite aversion to killing things. But meanwhile there was high council being held among the wisest of them all. The students and thinkers who had been gathering facts from us all this time, collating and relating them, and making inferences, laid the result of their labors before the council. Little had we thought that our careful efforts at concealment had been so easily seen through, with never a word to show us that they saw. They had followed up words of ours on the science of optics, asked innocent questions about glasses and the like, and were aware of the defective eyesight so common among us. With the lightest touch, different women asking different questions at different times, and putting all our answers together like a picture puzzle, they had figured out a sort of skeleton chart as to the prevalence of disease among us. Even more subtly, with no show of horror or condemnation, they had gathered something, far from the truth, but something pretty clear, about poverty, vice, and crime. They even had a goodly number of our dangers all itemized, from asking us about insurance and innocent things like that. They were well posted as to the different races, beginning with their poison arrow natives down below, had widening out to a broad racial division we had told them about. Never a shocked expression of the face or an exclamation of revolt had warned us. They had been extracting the evidence without our knowing it all this time, and now were studying with the most devout earnestness the matter they had prepared. The result was rather distressing to us. They first explained the matter fully to Elador, as she was the one who purposed visiting the rest of the world. To Celes they said nothing. She must not be in any way distressed, while the whole nation waited on her great work. Finally Jeff and I were called in. Somal and Zava were there, and Elador, with many others that we knew. They had a great globe, quite fairly mapped out from the small section maps in that compendium of ours. They had the different peoples of the earth roughly outlined, and their status and civilization indicated. They had charts and figures and estimates, based on the facts in that traitorous little book, and what they had learned from us. Somal explained, We find that in all your historic period, so much longer than ours, that with all the interplay of services, the exchange of inventions and discoveries, and the wonderful progress we so admire, that in this widespread other world of yours there is still much disease, often contagious. We admitted this at once. Also there is still in varying degrees ignorance, with prejudice and unbridled emotion. This too was admitted. We find also that in spite of the advance of democracy and the increase of wealth, that there is still unrest, and sometimes combat. Yes, yes, we admitted it all. We were used to these things, and saw no reason for so much seriousness. All things considered, they said, and they did not say a hundredth part of the things they were considering. We are unwilling to expose our country to free communication with the rest of the world, as yet. If Elador comes back, and we approve her report, it may be done later, but not yet. So we have this to ask of you gentlemen. They knew that word was held a title of honor with us. That you promise not in any way to betray the location of this country until permission, after Elador's return. Jeff was perfectly satisfied. He thought they were quite right. He always did. I never saw an alien become naturalized more quickly than that man in her land. I studied it a while, thinking of the time they'd have if some of our contagions got loose there, and concluded they were right. So I agreed. Terry was the obstacle. Indeed I won't, he protested. The first thing I'll do is get an expedition fixed up to force an entrance into ma-land. Then, they said quite calmly, he must remain an absolute prisoner always. Anesthesia would be kinder, urged Moedin, and safer, added Zava. He will promise, I think, said Elador. And he did, with which agreement we at last left her land. End of Chapter 12. End of Her Land by Charlotte Perkins Gilman.