“Oh, we are to inherit the earth, if that is what you mean,” she said.

“The phrase is comprehensive,” I said.  I was determined not to give myself away.  “Where in the world do you come from?” I repeated.  The question, I was quite conscious, would have sufficed, but in the hope, I suppose, of establishing my intellectual superiority, I continued: 

“You know, fair play’s a jewel.  Now I’m quite willing to give you information as to myself.  I have already told you the essentials—­you ought to tell me something.  It would only be fair play.”

“Why should there be any fair play?” she asked.

“What have you to say against that?” I said.  “Do you not number it among your national characteristics?”

“You really wish to know where I come from?”

I expressed light-hearted acquiescence.

“Listen,” she said, and uttered some sounds.  I felt a kind of unholy emotion.  It had come like a sudden, suddenly hushed, intense gust of wind through a breathless day.  “What—­what!” I cried.

“I said I inhabit the Fourth Dimension.”

I recovered my equanimity with the thought that I had been visited by some stroke of an obscure and unimportant physical kind.

“I think we must have been climbing the hill too fast for me,” I said, “I have not been very well.  I missed what you said.”  I was certainly out of breath.

“I said I inhabit the Fourth Dimension,” she repeated with admirable gravity.

“Oh, come,” I expostulated, “this is playing it rather low down.  You walk a convalescent out of breath and then propound riddles to him.”

I was recovering my breath, and, with it, my inclination to expand.  Instead, I looked at her.  I was beginning to understand.  It was obvious enough that she was a foreigner in a strange land, in a land that brought out her national characteristics.  She must be of some race, perhaps Semitic, perhaps Sclav—­of some incomprehensible race.  I had never seen a Circassian, and there used to be a tradition that Circassian women were beautiful, were fair-skinned, and so on.  What was repelling in her was accounted for by this difference in national point of view.  One is, after all, not so very remote from the horse.  What one does not understand one shies at—­finds sinister, in fact.  And she struck me as sinister.

“You won’t tell me who you are?” I said.

“I have done so,” she answered.

“If you expect me to believe that you inhabit a mathematical monstrosity, you are mistaken.  You are, really.”

She turned round and pointed at the city.

“Look!” she said.

We had climbed the western hill.  Below our feet, beneath a sky that the wind had swept clean of clouds, was the valley; a broad bowl, shallow, filled with the purple of smoke-wreaths.  And above the mass of red roofs there soared the golden stonework of the cathedral tower.  It was a vision, the last word of a great art.  I looked at her.  I was moved, and I knew that the glory of it must have moved her.