“Where do you come from?” I asked. “You must belong to one of the new nations. You are a foreigner, I’ll swear, because you have such a fine contempt for us. You irritate me so that you might almost be a Prussian. But it is obvious that you are of a new nation that is beginning to find itself.”
“Oh, we are to inherit the earth, if that is what you mean,” she said.
“The phrase is comprehensive,” I said. I was determined not to give myself away. “Where in the world do you come from?” I repeated. The question, I was quite conscious, would have sufficed, but in the hope, I suppose, of establishing my intellectual superiority, I continued:
“You know, fair play’s a jewel. Now I’m quite willing to give you information as to myself. I have already told you the essentials—you ought to tell me something. It would only be fair play.”
“Why should there be any fair play?” she asked.
“What have you to say against that?” I said. “Do you not number it among your national characteristics?”
“You really wish to know where I come from?”
I expressed light-hearted acquiescence.
“Listen,” she said, and uttered some sounds. I felt a kind of unholy emotion. It had come like a sudden, suddenly hushed, intense gust of wind through a breathless day. “What—what!” I cried.
“I said I inhabit the Fourth Dimension.”