In this he is well served by his antipathies. His belief in personal self-determinism is so strong that he instinctively sees the vegetative nature of the ordinary life as a kind of moral slough, a state of being detestably without initiative, faith, energy, will. And consequently the Normal Social Life against which he is always tilting is a life seen by him with all the vividness of an intense personal and philosophical animosity. Consider, for example, the portraits of Mr. Pope and Mr. Stanley, survivals in a sense of the old Sir Roger de Coverley type, with all the sweetness gone out of it and only the odious qualities left, the domineering, vain, proprietary qualities. They exist mainly as symbols of everything that enlightened and right-minded daughters will not put up with; they come as near to being the foils of right destiny as Wells will ever allow; they sum up everything that stands in the way of man's free will. They are mercilessly dealt with, and they are memorable figures. Without this antipathy, and outside his own primary world, he pretty generally fails. One recalls, for example, old Mrs. Trafford in _Marriage,_ evidently intended to be his ideal of the enlightened woman grown old. She is a pale, dimly perfect, automatically wise old lady carved out of wood. Trafford himself, one feels, is a chip of the same block. Trafford obviously is not Wells himself, as Ponderevo and Remington are Wells: he is the Utopian counterpart of these persons, at least in the matter that concerns Wells most, the matter of sex. One could show that, aside from the six or eight chief characters who in their various ways express the nature and experience of Wells himself, he succeeds in his portraiture only where no demand is made on his sympathies.