Hfor the little people—make crooked ways straight and rough places plain, but the little people fear them, hedge them, pen them in, forbid their union and finally shoot them—in a sincere conviction that there isn't any place for big people in the world.
In "The Sea Lady" Mr. Wells gives one of his earliest pictures of that dream-woman which all the young men in his sociall novels go seeking so vainly through the world. She is really quite—a lovely and delicious creature, this woman whom Mr. Wells has created out of "infinite yearning." She is free, free and easy. She sings to the heart of man like the Lorelei. And if you desire to know why many people wish that Mr. Wells were Dr. Moreau or the King of the World or God the Invisible King—in his more sanguine moments I think it indubitable that he has identified himself with all three—it is because, if Mr. Wells had Eternal Femininity in his hands to reshape to the heart's desire, he would make it over in some such shape as this:
To go to her is like going out of a house, a very fine and dignified house, I admit, into something larger, something adventurous and incalculable. She is—she has an air of being—natural. She is as lax and lawless as the sunset, she is as free and familiar as the wind. She doesn't—if I may put it in this way—she doesn't love and respect him when he is this, and disapprove of him highly when he is that; she takes him altogether. She has the quality of the open sky, of the flight of birds, of deep-tangled places, she has the quality of the high sea. That I think is what she is for him, she is the Great Outside.
And with a flick of her mermaid's tail she slips down into the depths of the sea, leaving the hero to
