We know very little about methods of real soul culture--and you seem to know a great deal." Be that as it might, they certainly presented a higher level of active intelligence, and of behavior, than we had so far really grasped.

Having known in our lives several people who showed the same delicate courtesy and were equally pleasant to live with, at least when they wore their "company manners," we had assumed that our companions were a carefully chosen few.

Later we were more and more impressed that all this gentle breeding was breeding; that they were born to it, reared in it, that it was as natural and universal with them as the gentleness of doves or the alleged wisdom of serpents.
As for the intelligence, I confess that this was the most impressive and, to me, most mortifying, of any single feature of Herland.

We soon ceased to comment on this or other matters which to them were such obvious commonplaces as to call forth embarrassing questions about our own conditions.
This was nowhere better shown than in that matter of food supply, which I will now attempt to describe.
Having improved their agriculture to the highest point, and carefully estimated the number of persons who could comfortably live on their square miles; having then limited their population to that number, one would think that was all there was to be done.

But they had not thought so.