entary proposition.
He has tried in _Ann Veronica_--and again with a more delicate probe
in _Marriage_ and _The Passionate Friends_--to touch the hidden thing
that is causing all this surface inflammation. He has analysed and
diagnosed the exposed evil, always it seems with a certain
tentativeness, and we are left to carry on his line of research; many
of the difficulties of the problem are indicated, but no sovereign
specific for the malady.

_Tono-Bungay_ (1909) touches only casually on the sex question. The
involved love affairs of George Ponderevo are less essential than the
career of his uncle, the inventor of the patent medicine that gives a
title to the book. In many ways _Tono-Bungay_ is the best novel that
Mr Wells has given us. It is written in the first person, a narrative
form that afterwards served to convey Mr Wells' interpolated
criticisms of the bodies social and politic in something nearly
approaching the shape of an essay, but in _Tono-Bungay_ there are no
important divagations from the development of the story. The framework
of the book is provided by the life history of the narrator from early
boyhood to middle age, matter interesting enough in itself even if it
had not provided the means for revealing the inwardness of Edward
Ponderevo's character and career. He was not a bad little man, this
plump little chemist; a Lombroso or a Ferri would have found
difficulty in classifying him as a "criminal type," however eager
those investigators might have been to confirm their pet theories.
Ponderevo's wife--the inimitable Aunt Susan--called him "Teddy" and
his nephew endorses the appropriateness of that diminutive; he affirms
that there was a characteristic "teddiness" about Uncle Ponderevo. He
failed as a retail chemist in Wimblehurst. He was not naturally
dishonest, but he had windy ideas about finance, and he was careless
in the matter of certain trust monies. He was "imaginative, erratic,
inconsistent, recklessly inexact," and his imagination led him by way
of a patent medicine to company promoting on the Hooley scale. "Do you
realise the madness of the world that sanctions such a thing?" asks Mr
Wells in the person of the supposed narrator and points that question
on a later page as follows:--"At the climax of his Boom, my uncle at
the most sparing estimate must have possessed in substance and credit
about two million pounds' worth of property to set off against his
vague colossal liabilities, and fr