There was one thing which gave some of us considerable misgivings, and that was the question whether, after all, the language the professor was acquiring was really the girl's own tongue or one that she had learned from the Martians.
But the professor bade us rest easy on that point. He assured us, in the first place, that this girl could not be the only human being living upon Mars, but that she must have friends and relatives there. That being so, they unquestionably had a language of their own, which they spoke when they were among themselves. Here finding herself among beings belonging to her own race, she would naturally speak her own tongue and not that which she had acquired from the Martians.
"Moreover, gentlemen," he added, "I have in her speech many roots of the great Aryan tongue already recognized."
We were greatly relieved by this explanation, which seemed to all of us perfectly satisfactory.
Yet, really, there was no reason why one language should be any better than the other for our present purpose. In fact, it might be more useful to us to know the language of the Martians themselves. Still, we all felt that we should prefer to know her language rather than that of the monsters among whom she had lived.
Colonel Smith expressed what was in all our minds when, after listening to the reasoning of the Professor, he blurted out:
"Thank God, she doesn't speak any of their blamed lingo! By Jove, it would soil her pretty lips."
"But also that she speaks, too," said the man from Heidelberg, turning to Colonel Smith with a grin. "We shall both of them eventually learn."
Three entire weeks were passed in this manner. After the first week the girl herself materially assisted the linguists in their efforts to ac-quire her speech.
At length the task was so far advanced that we could, in a certain sense, regard it as practically completed. The Heidelberg professor declared that he had mastered the tongue of the ancient Aryans. His delight was unbounded. With prodigious industry he set to work, scarcely stopping to eat or sleep, to form a grammar of the language.