Then they decided it must be a direct gift from the gods, and placed the proud mother in the Temple of Maaia--their Goddess of Motherhood--under strict watch.

And there, as years passed, this wonder-woman bore child after child, five of them--all girls.
I did my best, keenly interested as I have always been in sociology and social psychology, to reconstruct in my mind the real position of these ancient women.

There were some five or six hundred of them, and they were harem-bred; yet for the few preceding generations they had been reared in the atmosphere of such heroic struggle that the stock must have been toughened somewhat.

Left alone in that terrific orphanhood, they had clung together, supporting one another and their little sisters, and developing unknown powers in the stress of new necessity.
To this pain-hardened and work-strengthened group, who had lost not only the love and care of parents, but the hope of ever having children of their own, there now dawned the new hope.
Here at last was Motherhood, and though it was not for all of them personally, it might--if the power was inherited--found here a new race.
It may be imagined how those five Daughters of Maaia, Children of the Temple, Mothers of the Future--they had all the titles that love and hope and reverence could give--were reared.

The whole little nation of women surrounded them with loving service, and waited, between a boundless hope and an equally boundless despair, to see if they, too, would be mothers.
And they were! As fast as they reached the age of twenty-five they began bearing.