reject.  That way of escape, however, soon raised financial obstructions to Trafford’s work.  He had to find a means for increasing his income, and came at last and inevitably to the necessity for making more money and continually still more.  The road to wealth was opened for him and he took it by sacrificing his research work, but when the economic problem had been triumphantly solved, he could not return to his first absorption in the problems of molecular physics.  Life pressed upon him at every moment of the day, he had been inveigled into a net.

The manner of Trafford’s escape from the thing that intrigued him has been severely criticised.  After I had first read the book I too was inclined to deprecate the device of taking Trafford and Marjorie into the loneliness of a Labrador winter, in order to set them right with themselves and give them a clearer vision of life.  But I have read Marriage twice since I formed that premature judgment, and each time I have found a growing justification for what at first may seem a somewhat whimsical solution to the difficulties of an essentially social problem.

But in effect this is the same specific that I upheld in my comment on the romances; it illustrates the need felt by a certain class of mind for temporary withdrawal from all the immediate urgencies and calls of social life; the overwhelming desire to see the movements and intricacies of human initiative and reactions, from a momentarily detached standpoint.  And Mr Wells has offered us a further commentary on the difficulties of this abstraction, by withholding any vision from Trafford until he was finally isolated from Marjorie, and even from any physical contact with the movement of what we call reality, by illness and fever.  Only then, indeed, did he touch the vital issues.  I find the statement of this ultimate thing, vaguely phrased in Trafford’s semi-delirium, presenting another expression of the thought quoted from The New Machiavelli; the conception of humanity as an instrument.  “Something trying to exist,” he says, something “which isn’t substance, doesn’t belong to space or time, something stifled and enclosed, struggling to get through.”  And later he repeats:  “It struggles to exist, becomes conscious, becomes now conscious of itself.  That is where I come in as a part of it.  Above the beast in me is that—­the desire to know better, to know—­beautifully, and to transmit my knowledge.  That’s all there is in life for me beyond food and shelter and tidying up.  This Being—­opening its eyes, listening, trying to comprehend.  Every good thing in man is that—­looking and making pictures, listening and making songs....  We began with bone-scratching.  We’re still—­near it.  I’m just a part of this beginning—­mixed with other things.  Every book, every art, every religion is that, the attempt to understand and express—­mixed with other things.”