ning.

Meanwhile my life was under a cloud. All pleasures palled upon me; all
sights tantalized and tempted me to outspoken treason, because I could
not but compare what I saw in Two Dimensions with what it really was if
seen in Three, and could hardly refrain from making my comparisons
aloud. I neglected my clients and my own business to give myself to
the contemplation of the mysteries which I had once beheld, yet which I
could impart to no one, and found daily more difficult to reproduce
even before my own mental vision.

One day, about eleven months after my return from Spaceland, I tried to
see a Cube with my eye closed, but failed; and though I succeeded
afterwards, I was not then quite certain (nor have I been ever
afterwards) that I had exactly realized the original. This made me
more melancholy than before, and determined me to take some step; yet
what, I knew not. I felt that I would have been willing to sacrifice
my life for the Cause, if thereby I could have produced conviction.
But if I could not convince my Grandson, how could I convince the
highest and most developed Circles in the land?

And yet at times my spirit was too strong for me, and I gave vent to
dangerous utterances. Already I was considered heterodox if not
treasonable, and I was keenly alive to the danger of my position;
nevertheless I could not at times refrain from bursting out into
suspicious or half-seditious utterances, even among the highest
Polygonal and Circular society. When, for example, the question arose
about the treatment of those lunatics who said that they had received
the power of seeing the insides of things, I would quote the saying of
an ancient Circle, who declared that prophets and inspired people are
always considered by the majority to be mad; and I could not help
occasionally dropping such expressions as "the eye that discerns the
interiors of things", and "the all-seeing land"; once or twice I even
let fall the forbidden terms "the Third and Fourth Dimensions". At
last, to complete a series of minor indiscretions, at a meeting of our
Local Speculative Society held at the palace of the Prefect
himself,--some extremely silly person having read an elaborate paper
exhibiting the precise reasons why Providence has limited the number of
Dimensions to Two, and why the attribute of omnividence is assigned to
the Supreme alone--I so far forgot myself as to give an exact account
of the whole of my voyage with the Sph