“Hatred; or, in such a case as this, indifference would be about as bad as anything.”
“Well, I don’t know much about such things, but do I seem like a person who could hate you or be indifferent to you?”
“No, Mona, you seem to be the most loving creature in all the worlds we have ever known, but—”
“Oh, do not spoil that fine speech with a ‘but.’ I know what you want to say. You think I ought to love you more than anyone else, or in some different way. Now, that desire of yours is what I cannot understand. I love everybody alike because I know of no other sentiment. So it is a matter of course with me, and I do not feel obliged to tell people that I love them. You seem to make too much of it, coming to me everyday and telling me, over and over again, that you love me, just as if I doubted it. Why do you like to be with me so much? Do you think it is right to be so exclusive? You ought to favor the others with your company. As for me, I must say I prefer Foedric’s society to yours, because he has so many interesting things to talk about, while you stick continually to one subject and give me little information even on that one. You know I am a new-comer here and eager to learn all I can. Then there’s the doctor. I take more pleasure conversing with him than with you, for he seems to know more, or, at any rate, to be more able to tell me things I want to know about the earth. If the doctor were not here and you were the only one to judge from, I should be obliged to think the people of the earth a very curious race. Your companion, however, appears to be a man of considerable sense.”
Mona sang all this in her easy, natural way, being perfectly free from any intention of wounding my feelings, but the more innocent I believed her the more incapable I saw she was of entering into my feelings. I began to realize how, in loving everybody, she missed a certain enjoyment derived from a more selfish order of love. It then occurred to me that a world full of such people as Mona must have rather a monotonous time from our point of view, and I asked her if she could tell me about her race in general respecting the subject of our conversation.
“Certainly,” she replied, “I can tell you something from my own recollections, but more from our traditions.”
“Well, were the men of the moon all sensible, or were they all like me?”
“Oh, I see you have a little sense as soon as you begin to talk in a new direction. In answer to your question, let me say that the stress you have put on our personal relations is something entirely new to me, and I do not see any use or advantage in it. This must be my excuse for speaking so plainly. I should not have spoken so had I not known, in spite of what I have said, that you had too much sense to be offended.”
“I thank you,” I said. “Do not apologize for your words. I have taken them as a needed rebuke for my haste in appropriating you to myself. But I believe, Mona, that the time will come when you will know the happiness of loving one person so much that your love for all others will not be thought of in comparison. Happy will he be who, in that day, is able to prove the capacity of your great heart.”
“Then, in that day,” she responded, “shall I prove myself to be the degenerate daughter of a noble race. No, my friend, we were not made of such stuff. We loved everybody, without question and without limit. We could do nothing else, and to love one more than another was therefore impossible.”