ery thin. He glanced at the
little group of Kondalians as he spoke, then leaped back to the
instrument board with an apology on his lips--they were gasping for
breath and shivering with the cold. He switched on the heating coils and
dropped the Skylark rapidly in a long descent toward the ocean.

"If that is the temperature you enjoy, I understand at last why you wear
clothes," said the Kofedix, as soon as he could talk.

"Do not your planes fly up into the regions of low temperature?" asked
Crane.

"Only occasionally, and all high-flying vessels are enclosed and heated
to our normal temperature. We have heavy wraps, but we dislike to wear
them so intensely that we never subject ourselves to any cold."

"Well, there's no accounting for tastes," returned Seaton, "but I can't
hand your climate a thing. It's hotter even than Washington in August;
'and that,' as the poet feelingly remarked, 'is going some!'

"But there's no reason for sitting here in the dark," he continued, as
he switched on the powerful daylight lamps which lighted the vessel with
the nearest approach to sunlight possible to produce. As soon as the
lights were on, Dorothy looked intently at the strange women.

"Now we can see what color they really are," she explained to her lover
in a low voice. "Why, they aren't so very different from what they were
before, except that the colors are much softer and more pleasing. They
really are beautiful, in spite of being green. Don't you think so,
Dick?"

"They're a handsome bunch, all right," he agreed, and they were. Their
skins were a light, soft green, tanned to an olive shade by their many
fervent suns. Their teeth were a brilliant and shining grass-green.
Their eyes and their long, thick hair were a glossy black.

The Kondalians looked at the Earthly visitors and at each other, and the
women uttered exclamations of horror.

"What a frightful light?" exclaimed Sitar. "Please shut it off. I would
rather be in total darkness than look like this!"

"What's the matter, Sitar?" asked the puzzled Dorothy as Seaton turned
off the lights. "You look perfectly stunning in this light."

"They see things differently than we do," explained Seaton. "Their optic
nerves react differently than ours do. While we look all right to them,
and they look all right to us, in both kinds of light, they look just as
different to themselves under our daylight lamps as we do to ourselves
in their green light. Is that explanatio