"What do you mean by the fourth dimension? There are length and breadth
and thickness, and what comes next?"

Christopher was pleased to find Elisabeth facing life's abstract
problems again; it proved that she was no longer overpowered by its
concrete ones.

"I don't know what its name is," she replied, looking dreamily through
the leafless trees; "perhaps eternity would do as well as any other. But
I mean the dimension which comes after length and breadth and thickness,
and beyond them, and all round them, and which makes them seem quite
different, and much less important."

"I think I know what you are driving at. You mean a new way of looking
at things and of measuring them--a way which makes things which ordinary
people call small, large; and things which ordinary people call large,
small."

"Yes. People who have never been in the fourth dimension bore me, do you
know? I daresay it would bore squares to talk to straight lines, and
cubes to talk to squares; there would be so many things the one would
understand and the other wouldn't. The line wouldn't know what the
square meant by the word _across_, and the square wouldn't know what the
cube meant by the word _above_; and in the same way the three-dimension
people don't know what we are talking about when we use such words as
_religion_ and _art_ and _love_."

"They think we are talking about going regularly to church, and
supporting picture-galleries, and making brilliant matches," suggested
Christopher.

"Yes; that's exactly what they do think; and it makes talking to them so
difficult, and so dull."

"When you use the word _happiness_ they imagine you are referring to an
income of four or five thousand a year; and by _success_ they mean the
permission to stand in the backwater of a fashionable London evening
party, looking at the mighty and noble, and pretending afterward that
they have spoken to the same."

"They don't speak our language or think our thoughts," Elisabeth said;
"and the music of their whole lives is of a different order from that of
the lives of the fourth-dimension people."

"Distinctly so; all the difference between a Sonata of Beethoven and a
song out of a pantomime."

"I haven't much patience with the three-dimension people; have you?"
asked Elisabeth.

"No--I'm afraid not; but I've a good deal of pity for them. They miss so
much. I always fancy that people who call pictures pretty and music
sweet must have a dreary time of