Brion took a deep breath. He was in over his head and far from shore. "Well--take a bachelor like myself. Since I like cross-country skiing I make my home in this big house our family has, right at the edge of the Broken Hills. In summer I looked after a drumtum herd, but after slaughtering my time was my own all winter. I did a lot of skiing, and used to work for the Twenties. Sometimes I would go visiting. Then again, people would drop in on me--houses are few and far between on Anvhar. We don't even have locks on our doors. You accept and give hospitality without qualification. Whoever comes. Male ... female ... in groups or just traveling alone...." "I get the drift. Life must be dull for a single girl on your iceberg planet. She must surely have to stay home a lot." "Only if she wants to. Otherwise she can go wherever she wishes and be welcomed as another individual. I suppose it is out of fashion in the rest of the galaxy--and would probably raise a big laugh on Earth--but a platonic, disinterested friendship between man and woman is an accepted thing on Anvhar." "Sounds exceedingly dull. If you are all such cool and distant friends, how do babies get made?" Brion felt his ears reddening, not sure if he was being teased or not. "The same damn way they get made any place else! But it's not just a reflexive process like a couple of rabbits that happen to meet under the same bush. It's the woman's choice to indicate if she is interested in marriage." "Is marriage the only thing your women are interested in?" "Marriage or ... anything else. That's up to the girl. We have a special problem on Anvhar--probably the same thing occurs on every planet where the human race has made a massive adaptation. Not all unions are fertile and there is always a large percentage of miscarriages. A large number of births are conceived by artificial insemination. Which is all right when you can't have babies normally. But most women have an emotional bias towards having their husband's children. And there is only one way to find out if this is possible." Lea's eyes widened. "Are you suggesting that your girls see if a man can father children _before_ considering marriage?" "Of course. Otherwise Anvhar would have been depopulated centuries ago. Therefore the woman does the choosing. If she is interested in a man, she says so. If she is not interested, the man would never think of suggesting anything. It's a lot different from other planets, but so is our planet Anvhar. It works well for us, which is the only test that applies."