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business.”
    “We certainly could be about some business,” he joked, but followed her anyway.
    Since it would still be some time until his divorce from Isabel was final, he and Jane lived together quietly in their new Euston home, calling little attention to themselves. The starry-eyed couple had already been ousted from one set of rooms when a suspicious landlady insisted that they produce their marriage certificate.
    As she took the lead down the path, Jane said, “Shall we go boating today? Or bicycling? Or just take a romantic walk down the lane?”
    He donned a straw boater hat to protect his pale skin from the sun. “Since I finished another Pall Mall article, let us celebrate by renting bicycles.”
    “Can we afford it?”
    “Not at all, but with our debts, what difference will a few farthings make?”
    In addition to their own expenses, circumstances required him to support his old mother, who still toiled as a servant at Uppark. His father, long separated from her, had never been able to hold a job or make a success of anything in his life. Sadly, Wells’s brother Frank seemed to be following in their ne’er-do-well father’s footsteps. Frank tinkered with clocks, fancying himself a skilled mechanic, but he had no business sense and little ambition to do any work that did not set itself in front of him. It was left to Wells to pay for Isabel’s needs. It never seemed to end, and he kept “writing away for dear life.”
    Times were hard … but they had always been hard, and he was accustomed to having no more than a few coins in his pockets. Though Wells had not achieved the goals he had hoped for in his life, he was happier than he had ever been before. He was with Jane. What could be finer? He would find a way to survive, somehow.
    After they reached the bicycle shop and Wells paid for their rental, he helped Jane situate herself, adjusting her skirts. “Someday a great man will invent a bicycle with two seats, so that you and I can be even closer.”
    She pedaled ahead, weaving in circles as she waited for him to join her. “It sounds impractical.”
    “Impracticalities have never stopped the common man from doing anything he found amusing.” Wells rode beside her, and they turned down a lane overshadowed by elms. Puffy white clouds scudded across the blue skies, and the day was warm.
    “Someday we should rent one of Mr. Benz’s new fourwheeled motorcars to drive around the parks,” Jane suggested. “Noisy new machines, all that clatter and smoke!”
    “If you desire such a vehicle, my dear, then we’ll do more than rent one—we shall own one. I read in the newspaper that Henry Ford in America has begun to market his own automobile.”
    “You always look to the future, H.G.”
    “On the day that everyone owns a four-wheeled motorcar, Jane, you and I shall have to ride horses—just to be different.”
    They talked together, barely paying attention to where they were riding. The mention of Karl Benz’s four-wheeled car led to a discussion of German industrial dominance and growing aggressiveness, now that Prussia and Germany had been fusedinto the Second Reich. Kaiser Wilhelm II had just signed a commercial treaty with the Russians that would make them into a much more powerful nation, and many Britons were worried.
    Next, Jane wanted to discuss the unusual art nouveau movement sweeping across Europe, after which Wells insisted on talking about Nansen’s departure from Norway on an ambitious expedition to reach the North Pole. When the conversation turned to politics, they discussed the Independent Labour Party, which Wells hoped would assist the downtrodden working class created by the Industrial Revolution.
    The lively exchange of ideas reminded Wells of just how different this was from his painfully silent afternoons with Isabel, who never even read the newspapers and couldn’t tell the difference between a starling and an ostrich, a thistle or a rose. At first Wells had talked with