The ignorance which made Chapman “laugh outright” when he was confronted by one of the most elementary facts of anthropology, is responsible for his reckless assertions in the paragraph above quoted.  It is an ignorant assumption on his part that it is the feelings of “respect, duty, and gratitude” that make a Bushman provide his bride’s father with game for a couple of winters.  Such feelings are unknown to the Bushman’s soul.  Working for the bride’s father is simply his way (if he has no property to give) of paying for his wife—­an illustration of the widespread custom of service.  If polygamy and the custom of purchasing wives do not, as Chapman intimates, prevent love from entering into all Bushman marriages, then these aborigines must be constructed on an entirely different plan from other human beings, among whom we know that polygamy crushes monopoly of affection, while a marriage by purchase is a purse-affair, not a heart-affair—­the girl going nearly always to the highest bidder.

But Chapman’s most serious error—­the one on which he founded his theory that there is love in all Bushman marriages—­lies in his assumption that the ceremony of sham capture indicates modesty and love, whereas, as we saw in the chapter on Coyness, it is a mere survival of capture, the most ruffianly way of securing a bride, in which her choice or feelings are absolutely disregarded, and which tells us nothing except that a man covets a woman and that she feigns resistance because custom, as taught by her parents, compels her to do so.  Inasmuch as she must resist whether she likes the man or not, how could such sham “coyness” be a symptom of love?  Moreover, it appears that even this sham coyness is exceptional, since, as Burchell informs us (II., 59), it is only when a girl grows up to womanhood without having been betrothed—­“which, however, seldom happens”—­that the female receives the man’s attentions with such an “affectation of great alarm and disinclination on her part.”

Burchell also informs us that a Bushman will take a second wife when the first one has become old, “not in years but in constitution;” and Barrow discovered the same thing (I., 276):  “It appeared that it was customary for the elderly men to have two wives, one old and past child-bearing, the other young.”  Chapman, too, relates that a Bushman will often cast off his early wife and take a younger one, and as that does not prevent him from finding affection in their conjugal unions, we are enabled from this to infer that “love” means to him not enduring sympathy or altruistic capacity and eagerness for self-sacrifice, but a selfish, transient fondness continuing only as long as a woman is young and can gratify a man’s sexual appetite.  That kind of love doubtless does exist in all Bushman marriages.