He remembered walking on a grassy meadow on a spring day. The grass was rich and luxuriant and the sun was hot copper in the sky. He was walking toward the top of a hill. Right at the top there was a single small, green tree. He was going to go up and lie down under that tree and look down in the valley at the meadow. And beside him there was—a presence. He remembered turning to look, and—nothing. There was nothing there.
But the feeling of the presence next to him made him pleased, somehow. It was right. It was not menacing, like this afternoon, it was more—comforting. As the sound the Skipdrive made was comforting. It made him feel fine. But when he turned to look, there was nothing.
He could not remember.
What kind of presence? Like the ship? No, much smaller. Smaller even than himself. Compared to the ship, he was small, quite small. He was infinitely smaller than even planetary mass. And there were things on the ship that were smaller than he.
But he couldn't quite place himself with assurance on the scale of size. He was larger than some things, like the bowl of soup, and he was smaller than other things, like planets. He must be of a sort of medium size. But closer to the bowl of soup than the planet.
A wife is a Martha.
He remembered thinking that just as the rockets had fired. It was in the song.... He whistled a few bars. I had a good wife but I left her, oh, oh, oh, oh.
And it had something to do with the remembered—presence, when he was walking in the meadow.
But what was a Martha? You can't define a nonsense word in terms of another nonsense word. Or perhaps, he thought ruefully, you can't define it any other way.
A wife is a Martha. A wife is a Martha. A Martha is a wife.