Herbert George Wells (born 1866), on his graduation in 1888 from the Royal College of Science, took up the serious side of science as a career, publishing in 1892-93 a textbook on biology. An editorial connection (with "The Saturday Review" in 1894-96) turned his attention to the literary possibilities of his favorite study, and in 1895 he began a series of novels in which by an extraordinary prescience of imagination he developed the suggestions of modern science into marvelous embodiments of newly discovered principles and powers which are shown to result in profound changes in both the social and individual character of man.
THE RED ROOM
By H. G. WELLS
"I can assure you," said I, "that it will take a very tangible ghost to frighten me." And I stood up before the fire with my glass in my hand.
"It is your own choosing," said the man with the withered arm, and glanced at me askance.
"Eight-and-twenty years," said I, "I have lived, and never a ghost have I seen as yet."
The old woman sat staring hard into the fire, her pale eyes wide open. "Ay," she broke in, "and eight-and-twenty years you have lived, and never seen the likes of this house, I reckon. There's a many things to see, when one's still but eight-and-twenty." She swayed her head slowly from side to side. "A many things to see and sorrow for."
I half suspected these old people were trying to enhance the spectral terrors of their house by this droning insistence. I put down my empty glass on the table, and, looking about the room, caught a glimpse of myself, abbreviated and broadened to an impossible sturdiness, in the queer old mirror beside the china cupboard. "Well," I said, "if I see anything to-night, I shall be so much the wiser. For I come to the business with an open mind."
"It's your own choosing," said the man with the withered arm once more.
I heard the faint sound of a stick and a shambling step on the flags in the passage outside. The door creaked on its hinges as a second old man entered, more bent, more wrinkled, more aged even than the first. He supported himself by the help of a crutch, his eyes were covered by a shade, and his lower lip, half averted, hung pale and pink from his decaying yellow teeth. He made straight for an armchair on the opposite side of the table, sat down clumsily, and began to cough. The man with the withered hand gave the new-comer a short glance of positive dislike; the old woman took no notice of his arrival, but remained with her eyes fixed steadily on the fire.