I was aware that I was indulging in platitudes, but the platitudes of Earth are novelties in Mars. Her eyes took a long leap from mine to the vague horizon line. "It is very strange," she said, "this distinction you make, I cannot understand it at all. It seems to me that this love we are talking about is simply one of the strong instincts implanted in our common nature. It is an essential of our being. Marriage is not, it is a social institution; and just why it is incumbent upon one sex more than upon the other, or why it is more desirable for one sex than the other, is inconceivable to me. If either a man, or a woman, desires the ties you speak of, or if one has the vanity to wish to found a respectable family, then, of course, marriage is a necessity,--made so by our social and political laws. It is a luxury we may have if we pay the price." I was shocked at this cold-blooded reasoning, and cried, "O, how can a woman say that! have you no tenderness, Elodia? no heart-need of these ties and affections,--which I have always been taught are so precious to woman?" She shrugged her shoulders, and, leaning forward a little, clasped her hands about her knees. "Let us not make it personal," she said; "I admitted, that these things belong to our common nature, and I do not of course except myself. But I repeat that marriage is a convention, and--I am not conventional." "As to that," I retorted, "all the things that pertain to civilization, all the steps which have ever been taken in the direction of progress, are conventions: our clothing, our houses, our religions, arts, our good manners. And we are bound to accept every 'convention' that makes for the betterment of society, as though it were a revelation from God." I confess that this thought was the fruit of my brief intercourse with the Caskians, who hold that there is a divine power continually operating upon human consciousness,--not disclosing miracles, but enlarging and perfecting human perceptions. I was thinking of this when Elodia suddenly put the question to me: "Are you married?" "No, I am not," I replied. The inquiry was not agreeable to me; it implied that she had been hitherto altogether too indifferent as to my "eligibility,"--never having concerned herself to ascertain the fact before. "Well, you are perhaps older than I am," she said, "and you have doubtless had amours?" I was as much astounded by the frankness of this inquiry as you can be, and blushed like a girl. She withdrew her eyes from my face with a faint smile and covered the question by another: "You intend to marry, I suppose?" "I do, certainly," I replied, the resolution crystallizing on the instant.