We stared wordlessly at each other until her gaze timidly dropped. With heart racing, I moved myself slowly toward her. I was afraid to frighten her; but she moved, not away, but to me. Abruptly my arms were around her. Thus I found my habitable world and my mate—beyond which the legitimate needs of man do not go. * * * * * The days that followed were happy ones for us both. We lived in our cave and seldom left it. The securing of food, preparing it, eating it, and sleeping until we were hungry again—this was our life. Animals, yet both of us with the latent intelligence of civilized human beings! Our spoken language came very fast. We seemed to be pent up with words, which once spoken were remembered almost without conscious effort. So it is with your Earth-children who are the despair of their parents because sometimes they do not talk until they are almost two years old. They have it stored up—and when they do give voice, their fluency is amazing. Our language? I cannot tell you what it was; I do not know. It seemed almost as though we were inventing it as we went along. Nona, in her spiritual and mental existence, was the counterpart of myself. Who she was, where she had come from—those questions she could not answer. Her mental life had started on the meteor with herself almost a matured woman. One’s mental life, you will realize, is dependent exclusively upon memory. And Nona’s memory previous to the time of our meeting was short and dim. Perhaps human memory only exists with spoken language—or social intercourse of a similar kind. I do not know. Even your hermit speaks, or has spoken to his fellow man. Time passed. How much time I cannot say. A month—five months perhaps. Time is as inconstant as the wind itself, as you would very soon perceive were you to live in semi-darkness, eating when you could get the food, sleeping when you were tired—and with no mechanical timepiece or its equivalent to measure arbitrarily your passing existence. The securing of a steady and varied supply of food gave us trouble. The day came when we could not capture a lizard. The fungus-like stuff Nona was growing I had begun heartily to dislike. I had searched every corner of the cave and its passageways for a lizard and had come back unsuccessful. Nona had started a fire and was sitting beside it drying her hair. Water was evaporating from her shoulders; she had been in the stream. A few molluscs, or something of the kind, lay at her feet. “See!” she cried triumphantly. “They are to eat. My man Nemo can get them—they are in the water.” I broke them open and ate one. It was good. I kissed her approvingly and her arms clung about my neck. Nona always was happiest in my approbation; she seemed to think of nothing save how to win it. When her caresses were passed, I stood up. “How do I get them?” I demanded. “Nona must show me once—then I will get very many of them for us to eat.”