I heard the nature of the Fourth Dimension—­heard that it was an inhabited plane—­invisible to our eyes, but omnipresent; heard that I had seen it when Bell Harry had reeled before my eyes.  I heard the Dimensionists described:  a race clear-sighted, eminently practical, incredible; with no ideals, prejudices, or remorse; with no feeling for art and no reverence for life; free from any ethical tradition; callous to pain, weakness, suffering and death, as if they had been invulnerable and immortal.  She did not say that they were immortal, however.  “You would—­you will—­hate us,” she concluded.  And I seemed only then to come to myself.  The power of her imagination was so great that I fancied myself face to face with the truth.  I supposed she had been amusing herself; that she should have tried to frighten me was inadmissible.  I don’t pretend that I was completely at my ease, but I said, amiably:  “You certainly have succeeded in making these beings hateful.”

“I have made nothing,” she said with a faint smile, and went on amusing herself.  She would explain origins, now.

“Your”—­she used the word as signifying, I suppose, the inhabitants of the country, or the populations of the earth—­“your ancestors were mine, but long ago you were crowded out of the Dimension as we are to-day, you overran the earth as we shall do to-morrow.  But you contracted diseases, as we shall contract them,—­beliefs, traditions; fears; ideas of pity ... of love.  You grew luxurious in the worship of your ideals, and sorrowful; you solaced yourselves with creeds, with arts—­you have forgotten!”

She spoke with calm conviction; with an overwhelming and dispassionate assurance.  She was stating facts; not professing a faith.  We approached a little roadside inn.  On a bench before the door a dun-clad country fellow was asleep, his head on the table.

“Put your fingers in your ears,” my companion commanded.

I humoured her.

I saw her lips move.  The countryman started, shuddered, and by a clumsy, convulsive motion of his arms, upset his quart.  He rubbed his eyes.  Before he had voiced his emotions we had passed on.

“I have seen a horse-coper do as much for a stallion,” I commented.  “I know there are words that have certain effects.  But you shouldn’t play pranks like the low-comedy devil in Faustus.”

“It isn’t good form, I suppose?” she sneered.

“It’s a matter of feeling,” I said, hotly, “the poor fellow has lost his beer.”

“What’s that to me?” she commented, with the air of one affording a concrete illustration.

“It’s a good deal to him,” I answered.

“But what to me?”