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 interests 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-maleness and turn gladly to the ultra-femaleness. 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 Ellador,
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 Ellador my friend, of Ellador
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
th