'That's a question, isn't it?' he said laughingly, yet not really trying to evade her. He wanted to hear her own answer, her own explanation. He knew quite well—had not the Primer on Expression said so?—that the things they discussed in this way lay just beyond known words. Only by apparent nonsense-talk could they be brought within sight at all.
'It's a thing we ought to know,' Joan went on gravely. 'I do know it somewhere—only I haven't found it out quite.' Then, with another flash of her blue eyes, she stated: 'If a person goes from here—from now, I mean—they must go to somewhere else. I suppose they go back to the bigger thing. They go all over the place at once, perhaps.' And again she drew back a moment, staring at him as if judging height and distance before taking a breathless swoop down into a lower branch.
'Something like that, I imagine,' her father began. 'Time, you see, is only a point, a single point—the present. And if——'
But Joan was already following her own wild swoop, and hardly listening.
'That I can understand,' she said rapidly. 'You escape at death from a point where you've been stuck—like in a photograph. You go all over then.' Her mind tried to say a hundred things. 'I understand. That's easy. I'm an all-over person myself; I do several things at once— like a flock of birds or a great high wind. And when I do things like that they're always right, but if I wait and think about one of them, they go wrong and I'm in an awful muddle——'
'Your intuition being stronger than your reason,' he put in with a gasp.
She did not notice the interruption; she had reached her tree; she saw a thousand things below her simultaneously, grouped, as it were, into one.
'But what I don't see plainly,' she returned to her original puzzle, 'is how a person—by dying—can get out of all this.' She flung her arms out wide to include the room. 'Out of all this air and stuff.'
'Space?'
'Yes, Space!' She darted upon the word with a twitter of satisfaction. 'I feel much more free among yards and miles, up and down, across and round and through—than I do just in minutes and days and years. Oh, I've got it,' she cried so suddenly that it startled him; 'Space is several things, and Time is only one. Space has throughth—you go through it in several directions at once. Time hasn't!'