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.