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."
I recovered my equanimity with the thought that I had been visited by some stroke of an obscure and unimportant physical kind.
"I think we must have been climbing the hill too fast for me," I said, "I have not been very
[6]
