Certainly these Martian girls were blessed with an ingratiating
simplicity. My new friend of the violet-scented breath hung back a
little, then after looking at me demurely for a minute or two, like
a child that chooses a new playmate, came softly up, and, standing on
tiptoe, kissed me on the cheek. It was not unpleasant, so I turned the
other, whereon, guessing my meaning, without the smallest hesitation,
she reached up again, and pressed her pretty mouth to my bronzed skin
a second time. Then, with a little sigh of satisfaction, she ran an
arm through mine, saying, "Comrade, from what country have you come?
I never saw one quite like you before."

"From what country had I come?" Again the frown dropped down upon my
forehead. Was I dreaming--was I mad? Where indeed had I come from?
I stared back over my shoulder, and there, as if in answer to my
thought--there, where the black tracery of flowering shrubs waved in the
soft night wind, over a gap in the crumbling ivory ramparts, the sky
was brightening. As I looked into the centre of that glow, a planet,
magnified by the wonderful air, came swinging up, pale but splendid, and
mapped by soft colours--green, violet, and red. I knew it on the minute,
Heaven only knows how, but I knew it, and a desperate thrill of loneliness
swept over me, a spasm of comprehension of the horrible void dividing us.
Never did yearning babe stretch arms more wistfully to an unattainable
mother than I at that moment to my mother earth. All her meanness and
prosaicness was forgotten, all her imperfections and shortcomings; it was
home, the one tangible thing in the glittering emptiness of the spheres.
All my soul went into my eyes, and then I sneezed violently, and turning
round, found that sweet damsel whose silky head nestled so friendly on
my shoulder was tickling my nose with a feather she had picked up.