The Research MagnificentWells, H. G. (Herbert George)
General
The Research Magnificent
Wells, H. G. (Herbert George)
Conduct of life -- Fiction
“No aristocrat has any right to be jealous,” Benham wrote. “If he
chances to be mated with a woman who does not see his vision or
naturally go his way, he has no right to expect her, much less to compel
her to go his way. What is the use of dragging an unwilling companion
through morasses of uncongenial thought to unsought ends? What is the
use of dragging even a willing pretender, who has no inherent will to
seek and live the aristocratic life?
“But that does not excuse him from obedience to his own call....”
He wrote that very early in his examination of the Third Limitation.
Already he had thought out and judged Amanda. The very charm of her,
the sweetness, the nearness and magic of her, was making him more grimly
resolute to break away. All the elaborate process of thinking her
over had gone on behind the mask of his silences while she had been
preoccupied with her housing and establishment in London; it was with a
sense of extraordinary injustice, of having had a march stolen upon her,
of being unfairly trapped, that Amanda found herself faced by foregone
conclusions. He was ready now even with the details of his project. She
should go on with her life in London exactly as she had planned it. He
would take fifteen hundred a year for himself and all the rest she might
spend without check or stint as it pleased her. He was going round the
world for one or two years. It was even possible he would not go alone.
There was a man at Cambridge he might persuade to come with him, a don
called Prothero who was peculiarly useful in helping him to hammer out
his ideas....
To her it became commandingly necessary that none of these things should
happen.
She tried to play upon his jealousy, but her quick instinct speedily
told her that this only hardened his heart. She perceived that she must
make a softer appeal. Now of a set intention she began to revive and
imitate the spontaneous passion of the honeymoon; she perceived for the
first time clearly how wise and righteous a thing it is for a woman to
bear a child. “He cannot go if I am going to have a child,” she told
herself. But that would mean illness, and for illness in herself or
others Amanda had the intense disgust natural to her youth. Yet even
illness would be better than this intolerable publication of her
husband's ability to leave her side....
She had a wonderful facility of enthusiasm and she set herself forthwith
to cultivate a philoprogenitive ambition, to communicate it to him. Her
dread of illness disappeared; her desire for offspring grew.
“Yes,” he said, “I want to have children, but I must go round the world
none the less.”
She argued with all the concentrated subtlety of her fine keen mind. She
argued with persistence and repetition. And then suddenly so that she
was astonished at herself, there came a moment when she ceased to argue.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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