“Unless I’m mistaken,� observed Crane, “that’s your astronomer wandering about in the garden. Think’s he’s a botanist, perhaps. Appropriate to the name of Green.�
“Oh, he often wanders in the garden and down to the meadow and the cowsheds,� said the young woman. “He talks to himself a good deal, explaining a great theory he’s got. He explains it to everybody he meets, too. Sometimes he explains it to me when I’m milking the cow.�
“Perhaps you can explain it to us?� said Pierce.
“Not so bad as that,� she said, laughing. “It’s something like that Fourth Dimension they talk about. But I’ve no doubt he’ll explain it to you if you meet him.�
“Not for me,� said Pierce. “I’m a simple peasant proprietor and ask nothing but Three Dimensions and a Cow.�
“Cow’s the Fourth Dimension, I suppose,� said Crane.
“I must go and attend to the Fourth Dimension,� she said with a smile.
“Peasants all live by patchwork, running two or three side-shows,� observed Pierce. “Curious sort of livestock on the farm. Think of people living on a cow and chickens and an astronomer.�
As he spoke the astronomer approached along the path by which the girl had just passed. His eyes were covered with huge horn spectacles of a dim blue colour; for he was warned to save his eyesight for his starry vigils. This gave a misleading look of morbidity to a face that was naturally frank and healthy; and the figure, though stooping, was stalwart. He was very absent-minded. Every now and then he looked at the ground and frowned as if he did not like it.
Oliver Green was a very young professor, but a very old young man. He had passed from science as the hobby of a schoolboy to science as the ambition of a middle-aged man without any intermediate holiday of youth. Moreover, his monomania had been fixed and frozen by success; at least by a considerable success for a man of his years. He was already a fellow of the chief learned societies connected with his subject, when there grew up in his mind the grand, universal, all-sufficing Theory which had come to fill the whole of his life as the daylight fills the day. If we attempted the exposition of that theory here, it is doubtful whether the result would resemble daylight. Professor Green was always ready to prove it; but if we were to set out the proof in this place, the next four or five pages would be covered with closely printed columns of figures brightened here and there by geometrical designs, such as seldom form part of the text of a romantic story. Suffice it to say that the theory had something to do with Relativity and the reversal of the relations between the stationary and the moving object. Pierce, the aviator, who had passed much of his time on moving objects not without the occasional anticipation of bumping into stationary objects, talked to Green a little on the subject. Being interested in scientific aviation, he was nearer to the abstract sciences than were his friends, Crane with his hobby of folklore or Hood with his love of classic literature or Wilding White with his reading of the mystics. But the young aviator frankly admitted that Professor Green soared high into the heavens of the Higher Mathematics, far beyond the flight of his little aeroplane.