of thing, the Henley interpolations were cut out again, and he had his own way with his text.
And now the writer reads this book, "The Time Machine," and can no more touch it or change it than if it were the work of an entirely different person. He reads it again after a long interval, he does not believe he has opened its pages for twenty years, and finds it hard and "clever" and youthful. And—what is rather odd, he thinks—a little unsympathetic. He is left doubting—rather irrelevantly to the general business of this Preface—whether if the Time Machine were a sufficiently practicable method of transport for such a meeting, the H. G. Wells of 1894 and the H. G. Wells of 1922 would get on very well together. But he has found a copy of the book in which, somewhen about 1898 or 1899, he marked out a few modifications in arrangement and improvements in expression. Almost all these suggested changes he has accepted, so that what the reader gets here is a revised definitive version a quarter of a century old.
"The Jilting of Jane" and "The Cone" are also very "young" things. "The Jilting of Jane" is the sort of little deliberately pleasant and sympathetic sketch that every young journalist was doing in those days. "The Cone" is the last surviving relic of what might have been a considerable lark to write; it was to have been a vast melodrama, all at that same level of high sensation. These two were done some time before the first rewriting of "The Time Machine" but before its final revision. After them comes a string of irresponsible stories. They are just inven-
xxii
