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 last things are discussed by the man and the woman in the wild--the man and woman, still comparatively young, about to return to a new life in civilisation. But what will they become when they return? What will Marjorie do when the shops once again lie temptingly before her, and when her aunt Plessington's guests once more besiege her, and social life presents itself again in its garish variety? Is this visit to the wild more decisive than marriage itself? Will their brief vision of God, their intellectual and spiritual conversion, make them "live happily ever after?" Mr. Wells, at least, should know that it will not; he will surely be bound to write another novel to show the final stage of Marjorie and Trafford, the renewed conflict, within them and between them, of the world and the spirit. For it is a conflict without end, a conflict which Mr. Wells, as he goes on writing the history of his own most interesting self in relation to his own most interesting environment, must contrive to present to us in each new book that he writes. III ARNOLD BENNETT