H. G. Wells

“ Oh! why should the life of every day conquer us? Why should generation after generation of men have these fine beginnings, these splendid dreams of youth, attempt so much, achieve so much and then, then become—this! Look at this room, this litter of little satisfactions! Look at your pretty books there, a hundred minds you have pecked at, bright things of the spirit that attracted you as jewels attract a jackdaw. Look at the glass and silver, and that silk from China! And we are in the full tide of our years, Marjorie. Now is the very crown and best of our lives. ”

“ But it is hard to make a change in the colour of one's life amidst the routine one has already established about oneself, in the house that is grooved by one's weaknesses, amidst hangings and ornaments living and breathing with the life of an antagonistic and yet insidiously congenial ideal. A great desire came upon Marjorie to go away with Trafford for a time, out of their everyday life into strange and cool and spacious surroundings. ”

“ It is impossible, dear, it is intolerable that life was made beautiful for us—just for these vulgarities."
"Isn't there——" She hesitated. "Love—still?"
"But——Has it been love? Love is a thing that grows. But we took it—as people take flowers out of a garden, cut them off, put them in water.... How much of our daily life has been love? How much of it mere consequences of the love we've left behind us?... We've just cohabited and 'made love'—you and I—and thought of a thousand other things...."
He looked up at her. "Oh, I love a thousand things about you," he said. "But do I love you, Marjorie? ”

“ But that evening brought Marjorie nearer to loving Magnet than she had ever been. Before she went to sleep that night she had decided he was quite a tolerable person again; she had been too nervous and unjust with him. After all, his urgency and awkwardness had been just a part of his sincerity. Perhaps the faint doubt whether he would make his request again gave the zest of uncertainty to his devotion. Of course, she told herself, he would ask again. And then the blissful air of limitless means she might breathe. ”

“ In this new light his passion for research and all the scheme of his life appeared faded and unworthy, as much egotism as if he had been devoted to hunting or golf or any such aimless preoccupation. Fatherhood gripped him and faced him about. It was manifestly a monstrous thing that he should ever have expected Marjorie to become a mere undisturbing accessory to the selfish intellectualism of his career, to shave and limit herself to a mere bachelor income, and play no part of her own in the movement of the world. ”

“ She had a clean intensity of feeling that made her delight in a thousand various things, in sunlight and textures, and the vividly quick acts of animals, in landscape, and the beauty of other girls, in wit, and people's voices, and good strong reasoning, and the desire and skill of art. She had a clear, rapid memory that made her excel perhaps a little too easily at school and college, an eagerness of sympathetic interest that won people very quickly and led to disappointments, and a very strong sense of the primary importance of Miss Marjorie Pope in the world. ”

“ Marjorie became white-lipped and heavy-eyed from want of sleep, and it seemed to Trafford that perhaps his child might die. It seemed to him that the spirit of the universe must be a monstrous calivan since children had to die. He went for a long walk through the October beechwoods, under a windy sky, and in a drift of falling leaves, wondering with a renewed freshness at the haunting futilities of life.... Life was not futile—anything but that, but futility seemed to be stalking it, waiting for it.... ”

“ As though it is foolish to follow a vortex ring into a vacuum, and wise to whack at a dirty golf ball on a suburban railway bank. Oh, their golf! Under high heaven!... You don't play golf, do you, by any chance?"
"Only the woman's part," said Marjorie.
"And they despise us," he said. "Solomonson can hardly hide how he despises us. Nothing is more wonderful than the way these people go on despising us who do research, who have this fever of curiosity, who won't be content with—what did you call those wrappers?" ”

“ All the pride and hope of human life goes to and fro in a little shell of air between this ancient globe of rusty nickel-steel and the void of space; faint specks we are within a film; we quiver between the atom and the infinite, being hardly more substantial than the glow within an oily skin that drifts upon the water. The wonder and the riddle of it! Here she and Trafford were! ”

“ Business and prostitution; they're the same thing. All business is a sort of prostitution, all prostitution is a sort of business. Why should one sell one's brains any more than one sells one's body?... It's so easy to succeed if one has good brains and cares to do it, and doesn't let one's attention or imagination wander—and it's so degrading. Hopelessly degrading.... I'm sick of this life, Marjorie. ”

“ Deep in her soul, the richest thing in her life indeed and the best thing she had to give humanity, was a craving for beauty that at times became almost intolerable, a craving for something other than beauty and yet inseparably allied with it, a craving for deep excitement, for a sort of glory in adventure, for passion—for things akin to great music and heroic poems and bannered traditions of romance. ”

“ Trafford ceased to listen. His mind was taking up this idea of Labrador. He wondered why he had not thought of Labrador before.
He had two or three streams of thought flowing in his mind, as a man who muses alone is apt to do. Marjorie's desire to move had reappeared; a particular group of houses between Berkeley Square and Park Lane had taken hold of her fancy, she had urged the acquisition of one upon him that morning, and this kept coming up into consciousness like a wrong thread in a tapestry. ”

“ Marjorie had thought of nothing else but love and him. Her happy assurance, her absolute confidence that his desires would march with hers, reproached and confuted every adverse thought in him as though it was a treachery to love. He had that sense which I suppose comes at times to every man, of entire unworthiness for the straight, unhesitating decision, the clear simplicity of a woman's passion. ”

“ That is the work now that is before all mankind, to attempt understanding—by the perpetual finding of thought and the means of expression, by perpetual extension and refinement of science, by the research that every artist makes for beauty and significance in his art, by the perpetual testing and destruction and rebirth under criticism of all these things, and by a perpetual extension of this intensifying wisdom to more minds and more minds and more, till all men share in it, and share in the making of it.... There you have my creed, Marjorie ”

“ Our difference isn't a difference in kind, old Marjorie; it's the difference between the old adventurer and the new feet upon the trail."
"We've got to come," said Marjorie.
"Oh! you've got to come. No good to be pioneers if the race does not follow. The women are the backbone of the race; the men are just the individuals. Into this Labrador and into all the wild and desolate places of thought and desire, if men come you women have to come too—and bring the race with you. ”

“ I heard Haldane at the Aristotelian once, go on for an hour—no! it was longer than an hour—as glib and slick as a well-oiled sausage-machine, about the different sorts of Absolute, and not a soul of us laughed out at him! The vanity of such profundities! They've no faith, faith in patience, faith to wait for the coming of God. And since we don't know God, since we don't know His will with us, isn't it plain that all our lives should be a search for Him and it? Can anything else matter,—after we are free from necessity? ”

“ It's queer how I go on talking after you have understood."
"It was just a flash," said Marjorie. "We have intimations. Neither of us really understands. We're like people climbing a mountain in a mist, that thins out for a moment and shows valleys and cities, and then closes in again, before we can recognize them or make out where we are."
Trafford thought. "When I talk to you, I've always felt I mustn't be too vague. ”

“ He was still more afraid—and this was even more remarkable—of the clear little judgments—hard as loose, small diamonds in a bed—that he thought Marjorie might pronounce on Sir Roderick. He had never disguised from himself that Sir Roderick was fat—nobody who came within a hundred yards of him could be under any illusion about that—and that he drank a good deal, ate with a cosmic spaciousness, loved a cigar, and talked and laughed with a freedom that sometimes drove delicate-minded new members into the corners remotest from the historical fireplace. ”

“ And we breed children and live in littered houses and play with our food and chatter, chatter, chatter. Oh, the chatter of my life! The folly! The women with their clothes. I can hear them rustle now, whiff the scent of it! The scandals—as though the things they did with themselves and each other mattered a rap; the little sham impromptu clever things, the trying to keep young—and underneath it all that continual cheating, cheating, cheating, damning struggle for money!...
"Marjorie, Marjorie, Marjorie! Why is she so good and no better! ”

“ They were to stand a little apart from the excitements and temptations of everyday life, to eat sparingly, drink water, resort greatly to self-criticism and self-examination, and harden their spirits by severe and dangerous exercises. They were to dress simply, work hard, and be the conscious and deliberate salt of the world. They were to walk among mountains. Incidentally, great power was to be given them. Such systematic effort and self-control as this, seemed to Marjorie to give just all she wasn't and needed to be, to save her life and Trafford's from a common disaster.... ”

“ Well, a father must learn resignation, and he for one would not stand in the way of his girl's happiness. A day would come when, very beautifully and tenderly, he would hand her over to Magnet, his favourite daughter to his trusted friend. "Well, my boy, there's no one in all the world——" he would begin.
It would be a touching parting. "Don't forget your old father, Maggots," he would say. At such a moment that quaint nickname would surely not be resented....
He reflected how much he had always preferred Marjorie to Daffy. She was brighter—more like him. ”

“ He raised clenched fists. "I won't stand it, Marjorie. I won't endure it. Somehow, in some way, I will get out of this life—and you with me. I have been brooding upon this and brooding, but now I know...."
"But how?" asked Marjorie, with her bare arms about her knees, staring into the fire. "How?"
"We must get out of its constant interruptions, its incessant vivid, petty appeals...."
"We might go away—to Switzerland."
"We went to Switzerland. Didn't we agree—it was our second honeymoon. It isn't a honeymoon we need. No, we'll have to go further than that." ”

“ Upstairs Lady Solomonson betrayed a passion of admiration for Mrs. Remington, and Mrs. Millingham mumbled depreciation of the same lady's intelligence in Mary Gasthorne's unwilling ear. "She's passive," said Mrs. Millingham. "She bores him...."
For a time Marjorie found dinner-giving delightful—it is like picking and arranging posies of human flowers—and fruits—and perhaps a little dried grass, and it was not long before she learnt that she was esteemed a success as a hostess. ”

“ Trafford neglected no possible explanations. Did he want this great Renascence of the human mind because he was suffering from some subtle form of indigestion? He invoked, independently of each other, the aid of two distinguished specialists. They both told him in exactly the same voice and with exactly the same air of guineas well earned: "What you want, Mr. Trafford, is a change."
Trafford brought his mind to bear upon the instances of contentment about him. He developed an opinion that all men and many women were potentially at least as restless as himself. ”

“ The rest divert themselves with the dwarfish satisfactions of recognized vice, the meagre routine of pleasure, or still more timidly with sport and games—those new unscheduled perversions of the soul.
We are afraid of our new selves. The dawn of human opportunity appals us. Few of us dare look upon this strange light of freedom and limitless resources that breaks upon our world.
"Think," said Trafford, "while we sit here in this dark hut—think of the surplus life that wastes itself in the world for sheer lack of direction. ”

“ As she went about the preparation of the tea, her vividly concrete imagination was active with the realization of the life they would lead on their return. She could not see it otherwise than framed in a tall, fine room, a study, a study in sombre tones, with high, narrow, tall, dignified bookshelves and rich deep green curtains veiling its windows. There should be a fireplace of white marble, very plain and well proportioned, with furnishings of old brass, and a big desk towards the window beautifully lit by electric light, with abundant space for papers to lie. ”

“ It seemed incredible in this morning glow that the wooded slopes along the shore of the lake were the border of a land in which nearly half the inhabitants die of starvation. The deep-laden canoes swept almost noiselessly through the water with a rhythmic alternation of rush and pause as the dripping paddles drove and returned. Altogether there were four long canoes and five Indian breeds in their party, and when they came to pass through shallows both Marjorie and Trafford took a paddle. ”

“ All the freshness of his first love for Marjorie returned, his keen sense of the sweet gallantry of her voice and bearing, his admiration for the swift, falconlike swoop of her decisions, for the grace and poise of her body, and the steady frankness of her eyes; but now it was all charged with his sense of this new joint life germinating at the heart of her slender vigour, spreading throughout her being to change it altogether into womanhood for ever. ”

“ Marjorie remembered suddenly. "You're Professor Trafford."
"Not in this atmosphere. But I am at the Romeike College. And as soon as I recalled examining you I remembered it—minutely. You were intelligent, though unsound—about cryo-hydrates it was. Ah, you remember me now. As most young women are correct by rote and unintelligent in such questions, and as it doesn't matter a rap about anything of that sort, whether you are correct or not, as long as the mental gesture is right——" He paused for a moment, as though tired of his sentence. ”

“ She muttered self-reproaches while she worked like two men among the trees, panting puffs of mist that froze upon her lips and iced the knitted wool that covered her chin. Why don't they teach a girl to handle an axe?...
When at last the wolfish cold of the Labrador night had come, it found Trafford and Marjorie seated almost warmly on a bed of pine boughs between the sheltering dark rock behind and a big but well husbanded fire in front, drinking a queer-tasting but not unsavory soup of lynx-flesh, that she had fortified with the remainder of the brandy. ”

“ What are we to do?"
"Think," he suggested.
"We've got to live as well as think."
"It's the immense troublesome futility of—everything," he said.
"Well—let us cease to be futile. Let us do. You say there is no grip for you in research, that you despise politics.... There's no end of trouble and suffering. Cannot we do social work, social reform, change the lives of others less fortunate than ourselves...." ”

“ Moreover, when two people are continuously together, it is amazingly hard to know when and where to begin; where intercourse is unbroken it is as a matter of routine being constantly interrupted. You cannot broach these broad personalities while you are getting up in the morning, or over the breakfast-table while you make the coffee, or when you meet again after a multitude of small events at tea, or in the evening when one is rather tired and trivial after the work of the day. Then Miss Margharita Trafford permitted no sustained analysis of life in her presence. ”

“ Lee's imagination had run loose in pursuit of beautiful and remarkable people and splendours rather than harmonies of line and colour. Lee, like Solomonson, had that inexplicable alchemy of mind which distils gold from the commerce of the world ("All this," said Minter to Trafford, "is an exhalation from all that") ; he accumulated wealth as one grows a beard, and found his interest in his uxorious satisfactions, and so Mrs. Lee, with her bright watchful eyes, quick impulsive movements and instinctive command had the utmost freedom to realize her ideals. ”