The fashion spread like wildfire. Before a week was over, every Square and Triangle in the district had copied the example of Chromatistes, and only a few of the more conservative Pentagons still held out. A month or two found even the Dodecagons infected with the innovation. A year had not elapsed before the habit had spread to all but the very highest of the nobility. Needless to say, the custom soon made its way from the district of Chromatistes to surrounding regions; and within two generations no one in all Flatland was colourless except the women and the Priests.

Here Nature herself appeared to erect a barrier, and to plead against extending the innovation to these two classes. Many-sidedness was almost essential as a pretext for the innovators. “Distinction of sides is intended by Nature to imply distinction of colours”⁠—such was the sophism which in those days flew from mouth to mouth, converting whole towns at a time to the new culture. But manifestly to our Priests and women this adage did not apply. The latter had only one side, and therefore⁠—plurally and pedantically speaking⁠— no sides . The former⁠—if at least they would assert their claim to be really and truly Circles, and not mere high-class Polygons with an infinitely large number of infinitesimally small sides⁠—were in the habit of boasting (what women confessed and deplored) that they also had no sides, being blessed with a perimeter of one line, or, in other words, a circumference. Hence it came to pass that these two classes could see no force in the so-called axiom about “Distinction of Sides implying Distinction of Colour”; and when all others had succumbed to the fascinations of corporal decoration, the Priests and the women alone still remained pure from the pollution of paint.