She was smiling.  “Look!” she repeated.  I looked.

There was the purple and the red, and the golden tower, the vision, the last word.  She said something—­uttered some sound.

What had happened?  I don’t know.  It all looked contemptible.  One seemed to see something beyond, something vaster—­vaster than cathedrals, vaster than the conception of the gods to whom cathedrals were raised.  The tower reeled out of the perpendicular.  One saw beyond it, not roofs, or smoke, or hills, but an unrealised, an unrealisable infinity of space.

It was merely momentary.  The tower filled its place again and I looked at her.

“What the devil,” I said, hysterically—­“what the devil do you play these tricks upon me for?”

“You see,” she answered, “the rudiments of the sense are there.”

“You must excuse me if I fail to understand,” I said, grasping after fragments of dropped dignity.  “I am subject to fits of giddiness.”  I felt a need for covering a species of nakedness.  “Pardon my swearing,” I added; a proof of recovered equanimity.

We resumed the road in silence.  I was physically and mentally shaken; and I tried to deceive myself as to the cause.  After some time I said: 

“You insist then in preserving your—­your incognito.”

“Oh, I make no mystery of myself,” she answered.

“You have told me that you come from the Fourth Dimension,” I remarked, ironically.

“I come from the Fourth Dimension,” she said, patiently.  She had the air of one in a position of difficulty; of one aware of it and ready to brave it.  She had the listlessness of an enlightened person who has to explain, over and over again, to stupid children some rudimentary point of the multiplication table.

She seemed to divine my thoughts, to be aware of their very wording.  She even said “yes” at the opening of her next speech.

“Yes,” she said.  “It is as if I were to try to explain the new ideas of any age to a person of the age that has gone before.”  She paused, seeking a concrete illustration that would touch me.  “As if I were explaining to Dr. Johnson the methods and the ultimate vogue of the cockney school of poetry.”

“I understand,” I said, “that you wish me to consider myself as relatively a Choctaw.  But what I do not understand is; what bearing that has upon—­upon the Fourth Dimension, I think you said?”

“I will explain,” she replied.

“But you must explain as if you were explaining to a Choctaw,” I said, pleasantly, “you must be concise and convincing.”

She answered:  “I will.”

She made a long speech of it; I condense.  I can’t remember her exact words—­there were so many; but she spoke like a book.  There was something exquisitely piquant in her choice of words, in her expressionless voice.  I seemed to be listening to a phonograph reciting a technical work.  There was a touch of the incongruous, of the mad, that appealed to me—­the commonplace rolling-down landscape, the straight, white, undulating road that, from the tops of rises, one saw running for miles and miles, straight, straight, and so white.  Filtering down through the great blue of the sky came the thrilling of innumerable skylarks.  And I was listening to a parody of a scientific work recited by a phonograph.