“What I always say is,” she continued, “why stop at a fourth dimension? Someone has written a book on the fourth dimension, and some day perhaps I shall write one on the fifth.”
“A book? A real book? Do you mean to say you could write a book? How clever! How romantic!”
“Well, I have thought about it. One is influenced. One has influences. The consciousness of the ultimate truth of things, the truth that suffuses all things, the cosmic nature of—well, the cosmos. Do you see? Tennyson’s In Memoriam.”
“Yes; Tennyson’s In Memoriam does help, doesn’t it?”
“Did I say Tennyson’s In Memoriam? I really meant [91] ]Shelley’s Revolt of Islam. The fourth dimension is played out. It’s done with. It was true so far as it went, but how far did it go?”
“Only a very little way,” I answered.
“Yes, but Nietzsche goes much farther. Have you read Nietzsche? No? I haven’t, either. But I have heard Orage talk about him. Nietzsche says we can all do what we want. We must dare things. We must be blond beasts. Mary Wollstonecraft and her set, you know. Godwin and those people.”
She waved her hockey-stick recklessly in the air and marched inconsequently away. Nearly all the Theosophists I met were like that—inconsequent, bent on writing books they never did write, talkers of divine flapdoodle, inanely clever, cleverly inane. Dear freaks I used to meet in days gone by!—where are you now?—where are you now?
. . . . . . . .
A freak who ultimately lost all reason and was confined in a private asylum used to sit at the same desk that I did when, many years ago, I was a shipping clerk in Manchester. This man, whose name was not, but should have been, Bundle, had considerable private means, but some obscure need of his nature drove him to discipline himself by working eight hours a day for three pounds a week. The three pounds was nothing to him, but the eight hours a day meant everything. He was a conscientious worker, but I think I have already indicated that his intelligence was not robust. He had no delusion; he merely possessed a misdirected sense of duty.