Page:The Works of H G Wells Volume 9.pdf/181

 wood-carving work you have found us here, and meanwhile I think you ought to inquire again. That's how the thing shapes to me."

"Your case will certainly have to be considered further," he says, with the faintest of threatening notes in his tone. "But at the same time”—hand out to those copies from the index again—"there you are, you know!"

When my botanist and I have talked over and exhausted every possibility of our immediate position, we should turn, I think, to more general questions.

I should tell him the thing that was becoming more and more apparent in my own mind. Here, I should say, is a world, obviously on the face of it well organised. Compared with our world, it is like a well-oiled engine beside a scrap heap. It has even got this confounded visual organ swivelling about in the most alert and lively fashion. But that's by the way You have only to look at all these houses below. (We should be sitting on a seat on the Gütsch and looking down on the Lucerne of Utopia, a Lucerne that would, I insist quite arbitrarily, still keep the Wasserthurm and the Kapellbrücke.) You have only to mark the beauty, the simple cleanliness and balance of this world, you have only to see the free carriage, the unaffected graciousness of even the common people, to understand how fine and complete the arrangements of this world must be. How are they made so? We of the twentieth century are not going to accept the