“No.”
“I think you have an exceedingly poor memory. First, you forgot Margaret as soon as the voice of that fair singer fell on your ear, and now you have forgotten the singer again the moment we have lost her. I await with much interest your first introduction to a daughter of Mars.”
“You will be disappointed,” said I, “if you think I shall be more than civil to her.”
“If she be handsome and can turn a tune moderately well, I shall be willing to wager a fair young planet against the moon that you will propose to her in a week.”
“I have done nothing to give you so poor an opinion of me. It is only your own diseased imagination, and I do not seem to be curing it very fast. I suppose, because your mind is naturally so strong, it is the more difficult to destroy such an hallucination as has taken possession of you.”
“I would give it up,” said the doctor. “The story is all true, and not a work of my imagination. Isn’t it more reasonable to believe that you could forget the circumstances I have related than that I could invent such a tale?”
“Oh, I never could forget it if I had been false to Margaret. You do not know me. If your vagaries had taken any other direction I might possibly be brought to think you were right.”
By this time we both began to realize that the conversation was not proving a great success in the way we had hoped, and so, after some pleasant words and a hearty laugh over the situation, we found our way to the deck again. Here there were various things to attract our attention, different members of the crew being eager to show us about. The doctor asked some question in regard to the system of steering the vessel, and when one of the men had taken him back toward the stern to explain the point, I found Thorwald and quietly explained to him the mental condition of my companion.
“The doctor is all right,” I said, “on every subject but one. His head must have been injured a little in his fall, and he imagines and asserts with positiveness that we found a young woman in the moon, the last of her race—a ridiculous idea, is it not?”
“And did you find any inhabitants at all?” asked Thorwald.