“’Dodd, that sort of laugh and those words of mine just used, are not Martian, they don’t belong to these rarefied beings here.  They have a human or earthly taint, and they frighten me.  I seem so lonely sometimes.  My stray fun which I once enjoyed on earth must somehow be forgotten here.  I feel so irreverent at times, so full of horse play, but I must keep up the high key and act like the rest.  Indeed for the most of the time I feel as they do, I suppose, but sometimes that sort of ribaldry and feelings of the ludicrous that made us joke, and prank, and cut up in genial companionships come over me, and I am suffocating with a glee out of place to this exalted society.  Ah! it’s good to feel you, my friend, so fresh and new from earth.  It’s promised here in the learned talk I have heard, that those who disappear from Mars become reincorporated upon earth again, if they belong there.  Well, I wouldn’t mind if I got returned, wonderful and sweet and happy as all this seems.  The dear, dear old Earth!’

“He flung his arms around me, and our faces met, as if we had been lost brothers.  A sort of terrifying melancholy invaded me.  I was so distant from all I had known and loved, so distant from the surges we had watched from our observatory at Christ Church, so distant from the life of heat and clothing and genial domesticities; the life even, it might be called, of the daily paper, the novel, the new book, the life of politics and human history, and conventionality, the life of ups and downs, of sickness and health, of individual enterprise, of routine and mechanical fatigue, the life of exertion, contrast and social inequality, with its picturesqueness, its incessant interest, all this was now utterly removed by all the measureless leagues of icy space between me and the floating planet—­the old sin-stricken Earth—­that was shining in the Martian skies, so inconspicuous and tiny—­so inaccessible.

“But my heart was pulsating audibly.  If I could recover Martha, if, in this serene atmosphere of good will and fairness and kindness, in the midst of unknown possibilities of knowledge, in the company of enthusiastic and high-minded men and women, in this arena of scientific wonders, and in the joy and beauty of universal happiness and thrift and peace and well doing and intuition, I could find a human companionship in the woman whose face and nature have summed up for me the whole of life, if I could find her! then, indeed, this new world would be all my earthly home could be, and the endless future with her for guide and friend would lose its terror and lonely isolation, and—­I dared to think it—­even the presence of God himself become bearable.