“Chapman did not understand the Martian faith.  There seemed little to understand about it.  It was one national expression of the love of goodness and of beauty, but it was all directed to a source of infallible wisdom, power and justice.

“Thus considering the country and its customs we fell again into a long colloquy: 

“‘Dodd,’ said Chapman, musingly, ’we should all become as these people about us, and do the same things, and believe and act as they do.  You will, but I think I remain a little strange.  I seem a spectator that a caprice has cast upon this globe, and though I live here, I must succumb to a certain alienation, a lack of mediation between their life and my former existence, and because of this subtle estrangement, I shall contract disease, or meet with accident, or waste in age, while you shall stay young, and living, sink into the Martian life and yield to it a spiritual, a mental acquiescence.  You will become absorbed, and, with your love realized, the whole rhapsodic life of this world will mingle you forever in its tide of song and science and labor.’

“‘Yes,’ I answered, ’I am sure I shall.  For whatever period of time I stay here, I am one with this beautiful and strange life.  I respond naturally to all this serenity and joy, this precision of power over inanimate things; this flooded being and the dawning sense that through the stepping stone of Mars, I approach yet higher beatitudes of living.  At least in Mars the sordid taint of suffering, of ignominious physical torture and privation, which spoiled the Earth, is almost unknown.’

“Chapman laughed, and an echo gave back from some hillside its musical response.  ’Ah, it may be, I know it is true, and yet—­and yet—­the Earth possessed a pictorial, a dramatic power in its contrasts of happiness and suffering, of goodness and sin.  It had literary material.  Its consecutive growth in the ages of social and national and economic history were so wonderful, so thrilling in interest, in the details of character and adventure, in the incessant panoramic display it gave of light and shade.  And on it rested the shadow of a strange, pathetic doubt, the mystery of creation.  Its romance, its fiction, its fable, and the animating picture it furnished, with its sceptics and its believers, its haters and its lovers, its tyrants and its heroes.  Its wide, verbal immensity!  I miss all that, or almost all.  This life is evenly celestial, and glowing, and carelessly happy.  And here knowledge is extreme and pervasive and omnipotent.  The dear commonplaces of the Earth life are unknown too, the ludicrous is absent, and the sublimity of sacrifice impossible.’

“He laughed again, and I felt for one brief, incredible instant a pang, too, that the blossoming, full, sensual Earth has passed from beneath my feet forever.

“But it was past.  For me nothing was left behind when Martha had gone before.  The future for me was the pilgrimage through worlds for her lost face.  The sum and substance of a world’s growth, of the unintermittent and heraldic progress of the soul was union with her.  And deeper in my convictions than science or faith or desire, lay the consciousness of my sure approach.