aken;
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.

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 reverenc