ing 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, a restfulness which was very pleasant.

"You must take me there someday, 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 a physiological necess