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.
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