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

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

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

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

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

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

Perhaps it seems rather cold-blooded to say "we" and "they," as if we
were not se