vern the constitution of
inorganic and progressively, perhaps, of organic, matter, was
sufficient to engross his mental energies, to give him a sense of
satisfaction in life; but his six hundred pounds a year proved
insufficient to satisfy the demands of Marjorie's claim to enjoyment.
She was not a mere type of the worldly-minded woman. She represents,
indeed, the claim of modern women for a distinctive interest and
employment not less urgent and necessary than the interests and
employments of men. And when she failed, as she plainly must have
failed, to find any such occupation, her sense of beauty and her
justifiable demand for life found an outlet largely in shopping, in
entertaining, in all such ephemeral attractions and amusements as
women in her class may seek and reject. That way of escape, however,
soon raised financial obstructions to Trafford's work. He had to find
a means for increasing his income, and came at last and inevitably to
the necessity for making more money and continually still more. The
road to wealth was opened for him and he took it by sacrificing his
research work, but when the economic problem had been triumphantly
solved, he could not return to his first absorption in the problems
of molecular physics. Life pressed upon him at every moment of the
day, he had been inveigled into a net.

The manner of Trafford's escape from the thing that intrigued him has
been severely criticised. After I had first read the book I too was
inclined to deprecate the device of taking Trafford and Marjorie into
the loneliness of a Labrador winter, in order to set them right with
themselves and give them a clearer vision of life. But I have read
_Marriage_ twice since I formed that premature judgment, and each time
I have found a growing justification for what at first may seem a
somewhat whimsical solution to the difficulties of an essentially
social problem.

But in effect this is the same specific that I upheld in my comment on
the romances; it illustrates the need felt by a certain class of mind
for temporary withdrawal from all the immediate urgencies and calls
of social life; the overwhelming desire to see the movements and
intricacies of human initiative and reactions, from a momentarily
detached standpoint. And Mr Wells has offered us a further commentary
on the difficulties of this abstraction, by withholding any vision
from Trafford until he was finally isolated from Marjorie, and even
from any physic