ave chosen them among millions,
unerringly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"It is a convention," he said. "We assume that motherhood is a
sufficient burden--that men should carry all