ward.

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER 11. Our Difficulties

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

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

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

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

The differences in the education of the average man and woman are
great enough, but the trouble