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.
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