was thrust upon him may account for his failure. It is only the
knowledge we seek that has any influence upon us.

_The Sea Lady_ (1902) stands alone among Mr Wells' romances. The
realistic method remains, but the conception is touched with a poetic
fancy of a kind that I have not found elsewhere in these books. The
Venus Annodomini who came out of the sea at Folkestone in the form of
an authentic mermaid was something more than a mere critic of our
civilised conventions. She was that, too; she asked why people walked
on the Leas "with little to talk about and nothing to look at, and
bound not to do all sorts of natural things, and bound to do all sorts
of preposterous things." But she was also the personification of
"other dreams." She had "the quality of the open sky, of deep tangled
places, of the flight of birds ... of the high sea." She represented
to one man, at least, "the Great Outside." And, if we still find a
repetition of the old statement in that last description, it is,
nevertheless, surrounded with a glamour that is not revealed in such
books as _In the Days of the Comet_. The ideal that is faintly
shadowed in _The Sea Lady_ is more ethereal, less practical; the
story, despite the naturalistic, half-cynical manner of its recountal,
has the elements of romance. The closing scene describes the
perplexity of a practical Kentish policeman "who in the small hours
before dawn came upon the wrap the Sea Lady had been wearing, just as
the tide overtook it," He stands there on the foreshore with a foolish
bewilderment, wondering chiefly "what people are up to." He is the
"simple citizen of a plain and obvious world." And Mr Wells concludes:
"I picture the interrogation of his lantern going out for a little
way, a stain of faint pink curiosity upon the mysterious vast serenity
of the night." And I make an application of the parable for my own
purposes, and wonder how far the curiosity of Mr Wells' readers will