other Line of which you speak. Instead of
moving, you merely exercise some magic art of vanishing and returning
to sight; and instead of any lucid description of your new World, you
simply tell me the numbers and sizes of some forty of my retinue, facts
known to any child in my capital. Can anything be more irrational or
audacious? Acknowledge your folly or depart from my dominions."

Furious at his perversity, and especially indignant that he professed
to be ignorant of my sex, I retorted in no measured terms, "Besotted
Being! You think yourself the perfection of existence, while you are
in reality the most imperfect and imbecile. You profess to see,
whereas you can see nothing but a Point! You plume yourself on
inferring the existence of a Straight Line; but I CAN SEE Straight
Lines, and infer the existence of Angles, Triangles, Squares,
Pentagons, Hexagons, and even Circles. Why waste more words? Suffice
it that I am the completion of your incomplete self. You are a Line,
but I am a Line of Lines, called in my country a Square: and even I,
infinitely superior though I am to you, am of little account among the
great nobles of Flatland, whence I have come to visit you, in the hope
of enlightening your ignorance."

Hearing these words the King advanced towards me with a menacing cry as
if to pierce me through the diagonal; and in that same moment there
arose from myriads of his subjects a multitudinous war-cry, increasing
in vehemence till at last methought it rivalled the roar of an army of
a hundred thousand Isosceles, and the artillery of a thousand
Pentagons. Spell-bound and motionless, I could neither speak nor move
to avert the impending destruction; and still the noise grew louder,
and the King came closer, when I awoke to find the breakfast-bell
recalling me to the realities of Flatland.

Section 15. Concerning a Stranger from Spaceland

From dreams I proceed to facts.

It was the last day of the 1999th year of our era. The pattering of
the rain had long ago announced nightfall; and I was sitting in the
company of my wife, musing on the events of the past and the prospects
of the coming year, the coming century, the coming Millennium.

[Note: When I say "sitting", of course I do not mean any change of
attitude such as you in Spaceland signify by that word; for as we have
no feet, we can no more "sit" nor "stand" (in your sense of the word)
than one of your soles or flounders.

Nev