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."