Even then, they’re two very different objects.
As equals, they are just a couple of barnyard fowls, clucking! generalised!
But dear me, when he comes prancing up with his red beard shaking, and his eye gleaming, and she comes slowly pottering after, with her nose to the ground, they’re two very different objects. You never think of equality: or of inequality, for that matter. They’re a cock and a hen, and you accept them as such.
You don’t think of them as equals, or as unequals. But you think of them together.
Wherein, then, lies the togetherness?
Would you call it love?
I wouldn’t.
Their two egos are absolutely separate. He’s a cock, she’s a hen. He never thinks of her for a moment, as if she were a cock like himself; and she never thinks for a moment that he is a hen like herself. I never hear anything in her squawk which would seem to say: “Aren’t I a fowl as much as you are, you brute!” Whereas I always hear women shrieking at their men: “Aren’t I a human being as much as you are?”
I always answer my spouse, with sweet reasonableness: “My dear, we are both British Subjects. What can I say more, on the score of equality? You are a British Subject as much as I am.”