gazing from somewhere not far from its lower stratum, was a substance in which he seemed to be fixed like a fly at the bottom of a pan of cold mutton tallow. He looked up at Bladesover Hall, where the Olympians sat looking down on the vicarage people, who looked down on the doctor, who looked down on the "vet," who looked down on the tenantry, who looked down on the butler and the housekeeper, and so by immutable degrees one descended from housekeeper to village shopkeeper, to head keeper, to cook, to publican, to second keeper, to blacksmith, to first footman, etc.
After a fist fight with the son of one of the Olympians the low born hero is banished to a stuffy, sniffing religious lower middle class family which on Sundays "met with twenty or thirty other darkened and unclean people, all dressed in dingy colors that would not show the dirt, in a little brick-built chapel equipped with a spavined roarer of a harmonium, and there solaced their minds on the thought that all that was fair and free in life, all that struggled, all that planned and made, all pride and beauty and honor, all fine and enjoyable things, were irrevocably damned to everlasting torments."
If you wish a sympathetic understanding of Mr. Wells's main intention you must first allow the asphyxiating atmosphere of this greasy, malodorous world to enter your lungs. That it may do so, and that you may recognize how easily Mr. Wells might have established a reputation as a "devastating" realist if he had not passionately loathed this reality and deliberately turned away from it, I will quote one other passage descriptive of that beautiful thing which conservatives call "the established order."
