Right here the husband of the little lady has something to say: "The trouble with him and the class he writes of," he announces, "is that they aren't busy enough. Let 'em work for a living, be interested in something vitally for ten hours out of the twenty-four, and they'll forget all about their neighbors' wives and be content with good men friends and casual women friends." This is an excellent example of what Wells finds the next most disturbing element in life--"muddle-headedness," the lack of ability to think straight, to think things through. "Let Wells be vitally interested in something for ten hours of the twenty-four!" Doesn't he see that if Wells had ever limited himself to ten hours of interest he would be making shirts today? It is because Wells works twenty-five hours of the twenty-four at being "vitally interested in something" that he is one of the major prophets of our time. And the thing in which he is interested is life itself, the great unsolvable mystery, life which extends below the simple, polished surface that is all the Victorian lady knows as the sea extends below its glassy smoothness on a summer day. One of the greatest things that Wells has done for some of us who came on him young enough so that our minds did not close automatically at his first startling revelation, is this: he taught us to look at life squarely, without moral cant, and with a scientific disregard as to whether it pleased us personally or not. We may not always agree with him--very likely we don't--but at least we must face the issue squarely and not take refuge in the vague sentimentality and slushy hopefulness of the Victorian lady. Wells states facts and very frequently lets it go at that. Witness the shock this method is to our little old lady. She asks how anyone at all worth while can be so "really wicked" as to write about sex and society as he does. She admits that what he says is a fact, _but_--it sticks out like a jagged, untidy rock from the smooth surface of things; therefore it is wicked. As a matter of fact that statement of his has no more to do with morality, is no more wicked, or virtuous, than the statement of a physical fact--to say, for instance, that glass breaks when hurled against a stone wall. It is unfortunate, but it is not "wicked." No, the day of Victorianism is past. We are slashing away the web, we are learning to _think_. It is a slow and painful process and we know not yet where the struggle will end. But at least we shall be nearer to the divine nakedness of truth. If Wells has done nothing else than to prove to us how much of our thinking is dictated not by our own souls but by the artificially-imposed sentimentality of the "little old Victorian lady" he has done a full man's work. And we who owe our emancipation largely to his vision can never be too thankful to him. FRANCES TREVOR. Rupert Brooke and Whitman