They felt a special claim on us--called us "their men"-- and when we were at liberty to study the land and people, and be studied by them, their claim was recognized by the wise leaders.
But I felt, we all did, that we should have chosen them among millions, unerringly.
And yet "the path of true love never did run smooth"; this period of courtship was full of the most unsuspected pitfalls.
Writing this as late as I do, after manifold experiences both in Herland and, later, in my own land, I can now understand and philosophize about what was then a continual astonishment and often a temporary tragedy.
The "long suit" in most courtships is sex attraction, of course.

Then gradually develops such comradeship as the two temperaments allow.

Then, after marriage, there is either the establishment of a slow-growing, widely based friendship, the deepest, tenderest, sweetest of relations, all lit and warmed by the recurrent flame of love; or else that process is reversed, love cools and fades, no friendship grows, the whole relation turns from beauty to ashes.
Here everything was different.

There was no sex-feeling to appeal to, or practically none.

Two thousand years' disuse had left very little of the instinct; also we must remember that those who had at times manifested it as atavistic exceptions were often, by that very fact, denied motherhood.
Yet while the mother process remains, the inherent ground for sex-distinction remains also; and who shall say what long-forgotten feeling, vague and nameless, was stirred in some of these mother hearts by our arrival?
What left us even more at sea in our approach was the lack of any sex-tradition.