material needs. He had abandoned research in order to make
Marjorie rich and to surround her with luxury and smugness. The
comfortable house, the artistic surroundings, the social pleasures,
and the ennui of acquaintances reveal themselves to him as
frustrations of the life which man in his more glorious capacity
seemed destined to live. He sees the impulses under which men and
women seek to escape "from the petty, weakly stimulating, competitive
motives of low-grade and law-abiding prosperity." Marriage is the
social bond which has involved him in this. Marjorie herself has
become the feminine embodiment of that urgent life of "getting on," of
just "doing," which seeks to trammel, stifle, and kill the spirit and
higher intelligence of man. Through marriage the earthy sociality of
life had thrust itself upon him, and was killing what was
apprehensive, curious, spiritually and intelligently aspiring within
him. He rebels. He flies to the wintry wilds of Labrador, and takes
Marjorie with him.

There, in a merely fantastic but brilliantly described scene, amid the
thrilling dangers of a wild solitude and a grim winter, they discover
themselves. They come near to one another in moments of peril,
deprivation, and self-sacrifice. He passionately asserts, she
passionately agrees, that "we can't _do_ things. We don't bring things
off!" ... "The real thing is to get knowledge and express it" ...
"This Being--using its eyes, listening, trying to comprehend it. Every
good thing in man is that--looking and making pictures, listening and
making songs, making philosophies and sciences, trying new powers,
bridge and engine, spark and gun. At the bottom of my soul, _that_."
He sees man without "eyes for those greater things, but we've got the
promise--the intimation of eyes."

This is not, it is to be feared, a very satisfactory solution for the
average man or woman who is suffering either from destiny unrealised
or from the milder malady of nerves. The medical or the spiritual
adviser who should prescribe a course of Labrador whenever we are
physically or spiritually "run down" would be of little use to the
majority of us. We see here the monkish side of Mr. Wells' temperament
deliberately torturing the social and worldly side of him, the spirit
suggesting to the flesh and the devil that they ought to be content
with spiritual contemplation. The mystic has the final word in those
humorous-passionate conversations in which first and