The position was the same as with us, of course, only with these distinctions. Alima, a shade more alluring, and several shades less able as a practical psychologist; Terry, a hundredfold more demanding—and proportionately less reasonable.
Things grew strained very soon between them. I fancy at first, when they were together, in her great hope of parentage and his keen joy of conquest—that Terry was inconsiderate. In fact, I know it, from things he said.
“You needn’t talk to me,” he snapped at Jeff one day, just before our weddings. “There never was a woman yet that did not enjoy being mastered. All your pretty talk doesn’t amount to a hill o’beans—I know.” And Terry would hum:
I’ve taken my fun where I found it.
I’ve rogued and I’ve ranged in my time,
and
The things that I learned from the yellow and black,
They ‘ave helped me a ‘eap with the white.
Jeff turned sharply and left him at the time. I was a bit disquieted myself.
Poor old Terry! The things he’d learned didn’t help him a heap in Herland. His idea was to take—he thought that was the way. He thought, he honestly believed, that women like it. Not the women of Herland! Not Alima!
I can see her now—one day in the very first week of their marriage, setting forth to her day’s work with long determined strides and hard-set mouth, and sticking close to Ellador. She didn’t wish to be alone with Terry—you could see that.
But the more she kept away from him, the more he wanted her—naturally.