Women in a Modern Utopia

Section 1.

But though I have come to a point where the problem of a Utopia has
resolved itself very simply into the problem of government and
direction, I find I have not brought the botanist with me. Frankly
he cannot think so steadily onward as I can. I feel to think, he
thinks to feel. It is I and my kind that have the wider range,
because we can be impersonal as well as personal. We can escape
ourselves. In general terms, at least, I understand him, but
he does not understand me in any way at all. He thinks me an
incomprehensible brute because his obsession is merely one of my
incidental interests, and wherever my reasoning ceases to be
explicit and full, the slightest ellipsis, the most transitory
digression, he evades me and is back at himself again. He may have a
personal liking for me, though I doubt it, but also he hates me
pretty distinctly, because of this bias he cannot understand. My
philosophical insistence that things shall be reasonable and hang
together, that what can be explained shall be explained, and that
what can be done by calculation and certain methods shall not be
left to chance, he loathes. He just wants adventurously to feel. He
wants to feel the sunset, and he thinks that on the whole he would
feel it better if he had not been taught the sun was about
ninety-two million miles away. He wants to feel free and strong, and
he would rather feel so than be so. He does not want to accomplish
great things, but to have dazzling things occur to him. He does not
know that there are feelings also up in the clear air of the
philosophic mountains, in the long ascents of effort and design. He
does not know that thought itself is only a finer sort of feeling
than his--good hock to the mixed gin, porter and treacle of his
emotions, a perception of similitudes and oppositions that carries
even thrills. And naturally he broods on the source of all his most
copious feelings and emotions, women, and particularly upon the
woman who has most made him feel. He forces me also to that.

Our position is unfortunate for me. Our return to the Utopian
equivalent of Lucerne revives in him all the melancholy distresses
that so preoccupied him when first we were transferred to this
better planet. One day, while we are still waiting there for the
public office to decide about us, he broaches the matter. It is
early evening, and we are walking beside the lake after our simple
dinner. "About here," he says, "the quays would run and all those
big hotels would be along here, looking out on the lake. It's so
strange to have seen them so recently, and now not to see them at
all.... Where have they gone?"

"Vanished by hypothesis."

"What?"