[Camilla:]"One child ought to be enough, for any woman, if she has anything above the neck, unless she's a real neurotic with no independent sense of self esteem."
"Camilla," Ewen said very gently, "this is biological. Even back in the twentieth century, they did experiments on rats and ghetto populations and things and found that one of the first results of crucial social overcrowding was the failure of maternal behavior. It's a pathology. Man is a rationalizing animal, so sociologists called it 'Women's Liberation' and things like that, but what it amounted to was a pathological reaction to overpopulation and overcrowding. Women who couldn't be allowed to have children, had to be given some other work, for the sake of their mental health. But it wears off. Women sign an agreement, when they go to the colonies, to have a minimum of two children; but most of them, once they are out of the crowding of Earth, recover their mental and emotional health, and the average Colony family is four children - which is about right, psychologically speaking. By the time the baby comes, you'll probably have normal hormones too, and make a good mother."

"She had to fight against developing too combative a personality, or becoming altogether a misanthrope. She suddenly caught herself. "Misanthrope" is someone who dislikes everybody, not just men. And they certainly had a word for someone who hates women: "misogynist." But the male lexicographers had somehow neglected to coin a word for the dislike of men. They were almost entirely men themselves, she thought, and had been unable to imagine a market for such a word."

If the one-year-old, the five-year- old, the twelve-year-old, and the twenty-year-old all find compatible personalities in the beloved, there is a real chance to keep all of these sub-personas happy. Love ends their long loneliness. Perhaps the depth of love can be calibrated by the number of different selves that are actively involved in a given relationship.

Like doctors and lawyers, the vendors of religion rarely criticize one another's wares, Joss observed.