“Well, then,” she pursued, with a smile, “when shall you come back?”
“Oh, never!” I answered. “No one ever leaves Altruria, if he can help it, unless he is sent on a mission.”
She looked a little mystified, and I went on: “Of course, I was not officially authorized to visit the world outside, but I was permitted to do so, to satisfy a curiosity the priors thought useful; but I have now had quite enough of it, and I shall never leave home again.”
“You won't come to live in America?”
“God forbid!” said I, and I am afraid I could not hide the horror that ran through me at the thought. “And when you once see our happy country, you could no more be persuaded to return to America than a disembodied spirit could be persuaded to return to the earth.”
She was silent, and I asked: “But, surely, you understood this, Mrs. Gray?”
“No,” she said, reluctantly. “Does Eveleth?”
“Why, certainly,” I said. “We have talked it over a hundred times. Hasn't she—”
“I don't know,” she returned, with a vague trouble in her voice and eyes. “Perhaps I haven't understood her exactly. Perhaps—but I shall be ready to do whatever you and she think best. I am an old woman, you know; and, you know, I was born here, and I should feel the change.”
Her words conveyed to me a delicate reproach; I felt for the first time that, in my love of my own country, I had not considered her love of hers. It is said that the Icelanders are homesick when they leave their world of lava and snow; and I ought to have remembered that an American might have some such tenderness for his atrocious conditions, if he were exiled from them forever. I suppose it was the large and wide mind of Eveleth, with its openness to a knowledge and appreciation of better things, that had suffered me to forget this. She seemed always so eager to see Altruria, she imagined it so fully, so lovingly, that I had ceased to think of her as an alien; she seemed one of us, by birth as well as by affinity.