Page:The Works of H G Wells Volume 9.pdf/132

 Our eyes meet, and I gather from the botanist that I am to open our case.

I do my best.

"You came from the other side of space!" says the man in the crimson cloak, interrupting me. "Precisely! I like that—it's exactly my note! So do I! And you find this world strange! Exactly my case! We are brothers! We shall be in sympathy. I am amazed, I have been amazed as long as I can remember, and I shall die, most certainly, in a state of incredulous amazement at this remarkable world. Eh? You found yourselves suddenly upon a mountain top! Fortunate men!" He chuckled. "For my part I found myself in the still stranger position of infant to two parents of the most intractable dispositions!"

"The fact remains," I protest.

"A position, I can assure you, demanding Tact of an altogether superhuman quality!"

We desist for a space from the attempt to explain our remarkable selves, and for the rest of the time this picturesque and exceptional Utopian takes the talk entirely under his control

§ 2

An agreeable person, though a little distracting, he was; and he talked, we recall, of many things. He impressed us, we found afterwards, as a poseur beyond question, a conscious Ishmaelite in the world of wit, and in some subtly inexplicable way as a most con-