Page:The Works of H G Wells Volume 9.pdf/343

 "Nonsense," he whispers, without looking at me. "It isn't that. It's—that scoundrel"

He has an impulse to rise. "That scoundrel," he repeats.

"He isn't a scoundrel," I say. "How do you know? Keep still! Why are you standing up?"

He and I stand up quickly, I as soon as he. But now the full meaning of the group has reached me. I grip his arm. "Be sensible," I say, speaking very quickly and with my back to the approaching couple. "He's not a scoundrel here. This world is different from that. It's caught his pride somehow and made a man of him. Whatever troubled them there"

He turns a face of white wrath on me, of accusation, and for the moment of unexpected force. "This is your doing," he says. "You have done this to mock me. He—of all men!" For a moment speech fails him, then; "You—you have done this to mock me."

I try to explain. My tone is almost propitiatory.

"I never thought of it until now. But he's— How did I know he was the sort of man a disciplined world has a use for?"

He makes no answer, but he looks at me with eyes that are positively baleful, and in the instant I read his mute but mulish resolve that Utopia must end.

"Don't let that old quarrel poison all this," I say almost entreatingly. "It happened all differently here—everything is different here. Your double will be back to-morrow. Wait for him. Perhaps then you will understand"

He shakes his head, and then bursts out with,