In the late 1930s Wells was suffering from a sense of failure in both his private and his public lives. Moura Budberg, whom he had first met in Russia in 1914, settled with him in London in 1934 but steadfastly refused to marry him despite his persistent pleading. In his public life the disappointment was, quite simply, that the world had not listened to his ideas. In a sympathetic memoir, C. P. Snow remarks on Wells's near-desperation in these years. Wells's work in the thirties, he says, became overbearingly didactic because he was hoping in vain to recapture his earlier audiences, to reclaim for his work as a teacher the prestige that he had forfeited as a novelist, and to compensate himself for the contempt levelled at him by the gifted young. In 1938 Wells abruptly asked, one evening in Cambridge, ‘Ever thought of suicide, Snow?’, and then confessed that he had been considering suicide himself since he had reached the age of seventy (he was then seventy-two). It is perhaps to be expected that a fighting temperament, propelled by neurotic energy, should express itself in alternating extremes of hope and despair. Dualism, as I have indicated, is a constant feature of Wells's work.