ge. Oh, I just can't wait to see it!"

What could I do? I told her in so many words that we had our unsolved
problems, that we had dishonesty and corruption, vice and crime, disease
and insanity, prisons and hospitals; and it made no more impression on
her than it would to tell a South Sea Islander about the temperature of
the Arctic Circle. She could intellectually see that it was bad to have
those things; but she could not FEEL it.

We had quite easily come to accept the Herland life as normal, because
it was normal--none of us make any outcry over mere health and peace
and happy industry. And the abnormal, to which we are all so sadly well
acclimated, she had never seen.

The two things she cared most to hear about, and wanted most to see,
were these: the beautiful relation of marriage and the lovely women
who were mothers and nothing else; beyond these her keen, active mind
hungered eagerly for the world life.

"I'm almost as anxious to go as you are yourself," she insisted, "and
you must be desperately homesick."

I assured her that no one could be homesick in such a paradise as
theirs, but she would have none of it.

"Oh, yes--I know. It's like those little tropical islands you've told me
about, shining like jewels in the big blue sea--I can't wait to see the
sea! The little island may be as perfect as a garden, but you always
want to get back to your own big country, don't you? Even if it is bad
in some ways?"

Ellador was more than willing. But the nearer it came to our really
going, and to my having to take her back to our "civilization," after
the clean peace and beauty of theirs, the more I began to dread it, and
the more I tried to explain.

Of course I had been homesick at first, while we were prisoners, before
I had Ellador. And of course I had, at first, rather idealized my
country and its ways, in describing it. Also, I had always accepted
certain evils as integral parts of our civilization and never dwelt on
them at all. Even when I tried to tell her the worst, I never remembered
some things--which, when she came to see them, impressed her at once, as
they had never impressed me. Now, in my efforts at explanation, I began
to see both ways more keenly than I had before; to see the painful
defects of my own land, the marvelous gains of this.

In missing men we three visitors had naturally missed the larger part of
life, and had unconsciously assumed that they must miss it too. It took
me a long