"Beautiful. Perfect. More perfect than ours. I want it. Give Palace and Garden of Eternal Summer for it. Two thousand work-slaves and fifty----" "And I'll see you damned first, sir, whoever you are!" said Redgrave, clapping his hand on to the butt of his revolver, and forgetting for the moment that he was speaking in another world than his own. "What the devil do you mean, sir, by insulting my wife----?" "Insulting. Wife. What is that? We have no words like those." "But you speak English," exclaimed Zaidie, going a little nearer to him, but still keeping the muzzle of her revolver pointing up to his hairless head. "No, Lenox, don't be afraid about me, and don't get angry. Can't you see that this person hasn't got any temper? I suppose it was civilised out of his ancestors ages ago. He doesn't know what a wife or an insult is. He just looks upon me as a desirable piece of property to be bought, and I daresay he offered you a very handsome price. Now, don't look so savage, because you know bargains like that have been made even on our dear old virtuous Mother Earth. For instance, if you hadn't met us in the middle of the Atlantic----" "That'll do, Zaidie," Redgrave interrupted almost roughly. "That's not exactly the question, but I see what you mean, and it was a bit silly of me to get angry." "Silly? Angry? What do those words mean?" said the Martian in his slow, passionless, mechanical voice. "Who are you? Whence come you?" "I'll answer the last part first," said Redgrave. "We come from the earth, the planet which you see after sunset and before sunrise." "Yes, the Silver Star," said the Martian without any note of wonder or surprise in his voice. "Are all the dwellers there like the gods and angels our children read about in the old legends?" "Gods and angels!" laughed Zaidie. "There, Lenox, there's a compliment for you. I really think we ought to be as civil to his Royal Highness after that as possible." Then she went on, addressing the Martian, "No, we are not all gods and angels on earth. There are no gods and very few angels. In fact there are none except those which exist in the fancy of certain prejudiced persons. But that doesn't matter, at least not just now," she continued with American directness. "What we want to know just now is, why you speak English, and what sort of a world this Mars is?" The Martian evidently only understood the most direct essentials of her speech. He saw that she asked two questions, and he answered them. "Speak English?" he replied, with a little shake of his huge head. "We know not English, but there is no other speech. There is only ours. Cycles ago there were other speeches here, but those who spoke them were killed. It was inconvenient. One speech for a world is best."