George struggles with ennui after breaking with Marion: "I suffered, I suppose, from a sort of ennui of the imagination. I found myself without an object to hold my will together. I sought. I read restlessly and discursively. . . . it seems to me as if in those days of disgust and abandoned aims I discovered myself for the first time. Before that I had seen only the world and things in it, had sought them self-forgetful of all but my impulse. Now I found myself GROUPED with a system of appetites and satisfactions, with much work to do – and no desire, it seemed, left in me. There were moments when I thought of suicide". George only partially resolves this moral crisis by, as he says, "idealis[ing] Science".H. G. Wells, Tono-Bungay, Book II, Ch. 4, §10 (New York: Modern Library, n.d. [1937]), pp. 233–34.
