When I recovered my own senses, and had
contrived to restore Eveena's, my unwilling assistant had disappeared.
It was an hour before Eveena seemed in a condition to be removed, and
perhaps I was not very urgent to hurry her away. I had done no more
than any man, the lowest and meanest on Earth, must have done under
the circumstances. I can scarcely enter into the feelings of the
fellow-man who, in my position, could have recognised a choice but
between saving and perishing with the helpless creature entrusted to
his charge. But hereditary disbelief in any power above the physical
forces of Nature, in any law higher than that of man's own making, has
rendered human nature in Mars something utterly different from,
perhaps, hardly intelligible to, the human nature of a planet forty
million miles nearer the Sun. Though brought up in an affectionate
home, Eveena shared the ideas of the world in which she was born; and
so far accepted its standards of opinion and action as natural if not
right, that the risk I had run, the effort I had made to save her,
seemed to her scarcely less extraordinary than it had appeared to the
Zampta.
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