“Elsie’s father wrote ‘The King of the Fairies,’ that book! And she never told me!”
Kate sat on the edge of the table and bombarded him with questions. He answered them all. There were places that had puzzled even her mother in the book. He clarified them for Kate now. “My new book is clearer,” he said. “I am learning better how to say what I want to say.”
“Your new book! There is another!”
“Yes, it will be published this fall.” He told her about that. She was enthralled. She clasped her hands and listened, the corners of her mouth tilting up like wings.
Then it was her turn to talk. Nick was the sort of person who draws you out. In all her life Kate had never experienced such sympathy in a human being. That was Nick’s rare gift. She told him the story of her life, quite literally, at least, from the year she was seven, beginning with the day of her sharpest memory when she and her mother saw the fairy by the spring. It was very much on her mind now because of that experience at Madame Pearl’s and she told it all to Nick in detail. “How can it be explained?” she asked. “How could Elsie be just exactly that fairy?”
“That’s a hard question,” he agreed. “But if there’s anything in what these fourth dimensional experts are saying—then it might be explained reasonably enough, even mathematically. You know they say time is the fourth dimension. Well, in that instant in the woods, they might say, you got somehow into a four-dimension world.”
But Kate did not understand. Nick came from his station between the windows and sat on the edge of the table beside her, forgetting the hypothetical somebody in the orchard, and went into the subject more deeply. Kate followed his reasoning for a time, almost as though she were beginning to grasp something of the meaning of it all, when, bang! She slipped back to her first position of ignorance. She didn’t understand a bit.
Nick laughed. “It’s exactly the same with me,” he confessed. “I get a little farther than you do now in grasping it perhaps, and then ‘bang!’ just as you say, I lose the steps by which I got there. However, we can know that science itself is working toward some such explanation for that fairy by the spring of yours and its like.”
“And so you don’t believe in fairies at all? I was really only looking into the future, at Elsie as she would be years away, in that mirror of Madame Pearl’s?”
“Nonsense. Just because we have reason to believe that what you saw wasn’t a fairy—since it was Elsie and couldn’t be—proves no case against the existence of fairies. Does it? Yes, I believe in fairies right enough, but that’s a matter of faith with me rather than reasonable conviction.”