Page:The Works of H G Wells Volume 5.pdf/279

 Then P,

T U P;

Until at last there stood complete, across the sky, this cheerful message to all who felt the burden of life's earnestness:

Snap! and it had vanished into night, to be followed in the same slow development by a second universal solicitude:

Not, you remark, mere cleansing chemicals, but something, as they say, "ideal"; and then, completing the tripod of the little life:

After that there was nothing for it but Tupper again, in flaming crimson letters, snap, snap, across the void.

Early in the small hours it would seem that young Caddles came to the shadowy quiet of Regent's Park, stepped over the railings and lay down on a grassy slope near where the people skate in winter time, and there he slept an hour or so. And about six o'clock in the morning he was talking to a draggled woman he had found sleeping in a ditch near Hampstead Heath, asking her very earnestly what she thought she was for