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But only this that people who are utterly ignorant will believe anything which you certainly knew before." "Anyhow," pursued Ellador, "she turned pale for a minute when I first said it." This was a lesson to me. No wonder this whole nation of women was peaceful and sweet in expression they had no horrible ideas. "Surely you had some when you began," I suggested. "Oh, yes, no doubt.
To Celis they said nothing. She must not be in any way distressed, while the whole nation waited on her Great Work. Finally Jeff and I were called in. Somel and Zava were there, and Ellador, with many others that we knew. They had a great globe, quite fairly mapped out from the small section maps in that compendium of ours.
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.
Three of us were to go: Terry, because he must; I, because two were safer for our flyer, and the long boat trip to the coast; Ellador, because she would not let me go without her. If Jeff had elected to return, Celis would have gone too they were the most absorbed of lovers; but Jeff had no desire that way.
When I tried to tell Ellador that women too felt so, with us, she drew away from me, and tried hard to grasp intellectually what she could in no way sympathize with. "You mean that with you love between man and woman expresses itself in that way without regard to motherhood? To parentage, I mean," she added carefully. "Yes, surely. It is love we think of the deep sweet love between two.
I mean the feeling that a very little child would have, who had been lost for ever so long. It was a sense of getting home; of being clean and rested; of safety and yet freedom; of love that was always there, warm like sunshine in May, not hot like a stove or a featherbed a love that didn't irritate and didn't smother. I looked at Ellador as if I hadn't seen her before.
Ellador told me afterward how easily this grief of hers was assuaged, and seemed ashamed of not having helped herself out of it. "You see, we are not accustomed to horrible ideas," she said, coming back to me rather apologetically. "We haven't any. And when we get a thing like that into our minds it's like oh, like red pepper in your eyes.
I had learned to see these things very differently since living with Ellador; and as for Jeff, he was so thoroughly Herlandized that he wasn't fair to Terry, who fretted sharply in his new restraint. Moadine, grave and strong, as sadly patient as a mother with a degenerate child, kept steady watch on him, with enough other women close at hand to prevent an outbreak.
All the time we knew that to these large-minded women whose whole mental outlook was so collective, the limitations of a wholly personal life were inconceivable. "We cannot really understand it," Ellador concluded. "We are only half a people. We have our woman-ways and they have their man-ways and their both-ways. We have worked out a system of living which is, of course, limited.
The approach of flattery she dismissed with laughter, gifts and such "attentions" we could not bring to bear, pathos and complaint of cruelty stirred only a reasoning inquiry. It took Terry a long time. I doubt if she ever accepted her strange lover as fully as did Celis and Ellador theirs. He had hurt and offended her too often; there were reservations.