Page:The Works of H G Wells Volume 5.pdf/18

 his work as a whole and of his ideas as a system, he has seized the opportunity to put into the same cover with "The Food of the Gods," and in the sharpest contrast with it, "The Sea Lady," which was written in 1901-2. In all his later novels, the reader will find more or less of the "Food of the Gods" getting itself mixed into the dietary of his intelligent characters, and the scaly, beautiful, irrelevant "Sea Lady" out of the primordial seas flapping her tail to their confusion. She flapped her way into the writer's imagination upon Sandgate beach one day in 1900, just upon that part of it which is shown in the frontispiece.