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"Then it may surprise you to know that there was a time when women needed men, when women loved men."

"No!" Aubretia gasped incredulously.

"It is true. But during the course of five thousand years an emotional transfer has taken place, from necessity. Now women need and love each other."

"But surely that is natural. Women are the same; they know about each other."

The Mistress shook her head sadly. "I'm afraid you're missing the point because you can't see the point. That is as it should be. An adaptation has taken place, a fundamental reorganization of the emotional architecture of womankind. But perhaps you can appreciate that it would be undesirable, perhaps even dangerous, to introduce a conflicting element. It would be fatal to introduce the idea of man because there is a chance, just the slight chance, that some women might respond to it—those women who have not quite conformed to the emotional pattern of the adaptation syndrome. That is why the male body in the Annex must be destroyed."

Aubretia remained silent for fully a minute. She was trying to understand things from two independent and divorced points of view. Primarily she was a citizen of a female world, living and existing within a circumscribed pattern of emotional behavior in accordance with what the Mistress termed the parthenogenetic adaptation syndrome; but in addition she was also a woman, and the man still hovered ghost-like in the depth of her mind, hinting at a different level of being beyond her imagination, a level that was simultaneously repulsive and fascinating, that tugged at her imagination and created strange transient sensations in her body that differed in some subtle way from the orgastic feelings that Aquilegia and her predecessors had aroused.

"I'll tell you something," the Mistress continued in confidential tones. "This is not the first man to be discovered. There have been many during the past millennia, hundreds