writers; I have not;
but because I find a pregnancy and a growing force behind these
minutiae that is strangely lacking from any other works of fiction in
which I can find any comparison.

There are, however, still two more novels to be disposed of before I
can examine the full expression of Mr Wells' purpose as I find it in
his later books. One of these novels, _Kipps_ (1905), is the next in
chronological order; the other, _The History of Mr Polly_, was
published in 1910, interpolated between _Ann Veronica_ and _The New
Machiavelli_. Both Kipps and Polly began active life in a draper's
shop. The former is explicitly labelled "a simple soul." He is at once
sillier and sharper than Hoopdriver, but, like that "dear fool" (the
phrase is Mr Wells'), Kipps has some very sterling qualities. He had
the good fortune to come into money--I cannot but count it good
fortune in his case--and was just wise enough to avoid a marriage with
Helen Walshingham--"County family. Related to the Earl of
Beaupres"--and if he shirked that match rather from sheer funk than
from any clear realisation of the futility of what he was avoiding, he
did, at least, run away with and marry that very charming little
housemaid, Ann Pornick, whom he had loved in his early boyhood. After
his marriage he lost the greater part of his money, and later
recovered it again; but all these shocks of fortune left him the same
simple soul, untroubled by any urgent problems outside the range of
his personal experience. His brief contact with the dreamer,
Masterman, and his friendship with the capable young
engineer-socialist, Sid Pornick, Ann's brother, only roused Kipps to a
momentary wonder, and his final enunciation of the great question was
representative. "I was thinking just what a Rum Go everything is," he
says. That question, to quote Mr Wells, "never reached the surface of
his mind, it never took to itself substance or form; it looked up
merely as the phantom of a face might look, out of deep waters, and
sank again into nothingness."

Mr Polly is a third variant of the Hoopdriver-Kipps genus. He had more
initiative, although he still presents a problem in inertia, and he is
the only one of the three who had a feeling for literature, and read
persistently, if vagariously. And Mr Polly did at last take his fate
into his own hands, commit arson, desert his wife and wander off, an
"exploratious adventurer," as he might have put it, to discover some
joy and poe