A NOVEL BY H. G. WELLS New York THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 1924 All rights reserved COPYRIGHT, 1923 and 1924, BY H. G. WELLS. Set up and electrotyped. Published April, 1924. Printed in the United States of America by THE FERRIS PRINTING COMPANY, NEW YORK. CONTENTS CHAPTER THE FIRST THE EXCURSION CHAPTER THE SECOND THE BEGINNING OF THE DREAM CHAPTER THE THIRD MISFORTUNES COME UPON THE SMITH FAMILY CHAPTER THE FOURTH THE WIDOW SMITH MOVES TO LONDON CHAPTER THE FIFTH FANNY DISCOVERS HERSELF CHAPTER THE

§ 1 Sarnac had worked almost continuously for the better part of a year upon some very subtle chemical reactions of the nervous cells of the sympathetic system. His first enquiries had led to the opening out of fresh and surprising possibilities, and these again had lured him on to still broader and more fascinating prospects. He worked perhaps too closely; he found his hope and curiosity unimpaired, but there was less delicacy of touch in his manipulation, and he was thinking less quickly and a

§ 1 "This dream of mine began," he said, "as all our lives begin, in fragments, in a number of disconnected impressions. I remember myself lying on a sofa, a sofa covered with a curious sort of hard, shiny material with a red and black pattern on it, and I was screaming, but I do not know why I screamed. I discovered my father standing in the doorway of the room looking at me. He looked very dreadful; he was partially undressed in trousers and a flannel shirt and his fair hair was an unbrushed s

§ 1 "And now," said Sarnac, "I have to tell of a tornado of mischances that broke up our precarious little home at Cherry Gardens altogether. In that casual, planless, over-populated world there were no such things as security or social justice as we should understand these words nowadays. It is hard for us to imagine its universal ramshackle insecurity. Think of it. The whole world floated economically upon a cash and credit system that was fundamentally fictitious and conventional, there were

§ 1 "In those days," said Sarnac, "the great majority of the dead were put into coffins and buried underground. Some few people were burnt, but that was an innovation and contrary to the very materialistic religious ideas of the time. This was a world in which you must remember people were still repeating in perfect good faith a creed which included 'the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting.' Intellectually old Egypt and her dreaming mummies still ruled the common people of the Euro

§ 1 "And now," said Sarnac, "I can draw near to the essentials of life and tell you the sort of thing love was in that crowded, dingy, fear-ruled world of the London fogs and the amber London sunshine. It was a slender, wild-eyed, scared and daring emotion in a dark forest of cruelties and repressions. It soon grew old and crippled, bitter-spirited and black-hearted, but as it happened, death came early enough for me to die with a living love still in my heart...." "To live again," said Sunray v

§ 1 "And now," said Sarnac, "comes a change of costume. You have been thinking of me, I suppose, as a gawky youth of seventeen or eighteen, dressed in those ill-fitting wholesale clothes we used to call 'ready-mades.' That youth wore a white collar round his neck and a black jacket and dark grey trousers of a confused furtive patterning and his hat was a black hemisphere with a little brim, called a Bowler. Now he changes into another sort of 'ready-mades,' even more ill-fitting,—the khaki unifo

§ 1 "In the two years that followed I learnt to love and trust my stiff-spirited wife more and more. She was very brave in a conscious and deliberate way, very clear-headed, very honest. I saw her fight, and it was not an easy fight, to bring our son into the world, and that sort of crisis was a seal between man and woman in those days even as it is to-day. If she never got to any just intuitions about my thoughts and feelings I did presently arrive at a fairly clear sense of hers. I could feel

§ 1 The guest-master poked the sinking fire into a last effort. "So am I," he said, and then with profound conviction, " That tale is true. " "But how could it be true?" asked Willow. "I should be readier to believe it true if Sarnac had not brought in Sunray as Hetty," said Radiant. "It was very dreamlike, the way Hetty grew more and more like his dear lady and at last dissolved altogether into her." "But if Smith was a sort of anticipation of Sarnac," said Starlight, "then it was natural for h