tangles and troubles with women, and he has had his troubles. You
will hear of them, for that is the quality of his type. He gets no
personal expression in this book, the Voice is always that other's,
but you gather much of the matter and something of the manner of his
interpolations from the asides and the tenour of the Voice.

So much by way of portraiture is necessary to present the explorers
of the Modern Utopia, which will unfold itself as a background
to these two enquiring figures. The image of a cinematograph
entertainment is the one to grasp. There will be an effect of these
two people going to and fro in front of the circle of a rather
defective lantern, which sometimes jams and sometimes gets out of
focus, but which does occasionally succeed in displaying on a screen
a momentary moving picture of Utopian conditions. Occasionally the
picture goes out altogether, the Voice argues and argues, and the
footlights return, and then you find yourself listening again to the
rather too plump little man at his table laboriously enunciating
propositions, upon whom the curtain rises now.



CHAPTER THE FIRST

Topographical


Section 1

The Utopia of a modern dreamer must needs differ in one fundamental
aspect from the Nowheres and Utopias men planned before Darwin