The same absence of social background which throws into relief his primary world of characters throws into relief also the primary facts of human nature. Trafford and Marjorie, the most conventionally placed of his characters, pull up stakes, leave their children, and go to Labrador. His other men and women are even more independent of the social network. Consequently they are independent of that chain of relationships--friendship, affection, minor obligations--which mitigate, subdue, soften the primary motives of most people. They are almost startlingly physical. Their instincts are as sure as those of cavemen, and their conduct as direct. They are as clear about the essential matter of love as ever Schopenhauer was, or Adam and Eve, and they stand out as sharply against the embarrassments and secrecies of the usual world as a volcanic rock stands out against a tropical landscape. In this without doubt they exhibit the fact that socialism does and will actually alter human nature, and that in the instinctive socialist human nature is already altered. For socialism inflexibly militates against those more sentimental aspects of love, love of country as such, the paternal and feudal principles, love of property, and the like, which belong properly to the intelligence, all those functions where love, in a majority of cases, goes wrong, blunders, stultifies growth, confuses the public design of the world. As a result it throws love into relief, emphasizes the nature of sex and the _raison d'être_ of reproduction; makes it, to use a favorite word of Wells, stark.