Page:The Works of H G Wells Volume 5.pdf/427

Rh —positively, in our terrestrial fashion, you know—to marry him?"

The Sea Lady laughed at his recovery of the practical tone. "Well, why not?" she asked.

"And go about in a bath chair, and— No, that's not it. What is it?"

He looked up into her eyes, and it was like looking into deep water. Down in that deep there stirred impalpable things. She smiled at him.

"No!" she said, "I shan't marry him and go about in a bath chair. And grow old as all earthly women must. (It's the dust, I think, and the dryness of the air, and the way you begin and end.) You burn too fast, you flare and sink and die. This life of yours!—the illnesses and the growing old! When the skin wears shabby, and the light is out of the hair, and the teeth— Not even for love would I face it. No But then you know—" Her voice sank to a low whisper. "There are better dreams."

"What dreams?" rebelled Melville. "What do you mean? What are you? What do you mean by coming into this life—you who pretend to be a woman—and whispering, whispering to us who are in it, to us who have no escape."

"But there is an escape," said the Sea Lady.

"How?"

"For some there is an escape. When the whole life rushes to a moment—" And then she stopped. Now there is clearly no sense in this sentence to my mind, even from a lady of an essentially imaginary sort, who comes out of the sea. How can a whole