and his responsibilities extended. The whole world was civilised; the
whole world dwelt in cities; the whole world was his property....

Out of the dim south-west, glittering and strange, voluptuous, and in
some way terrible, shone those Pleasure Cities of which the
kinematograph-phonograph and the old man in the street had spoken.
Strange places reminiscent of the legendary Sybaris, cities of art
and beauty, mercenary art and mercenary beauty, sterile wonderful
cities of motion and music, whither repaired all who profited by the
fierce, inglorious, economic struggle that went on in the glaring
labyrinth below.

Fierce he knew it was. How fierce he could judge from the fact that these
latter-day people referred back to the England of the nineteenth century
as the figure of an idyllic easy-going life. He turned his eyes to the
scene immediately before him again, trying to conceive the big factories
of that intricate maze....




CHAPTER XV

PROMINENT PEOPLE


The state apartments of the Wind Vane Keeper would have astonished Graham
had he entered them fresh from his nineteenth century life, but already
he was growing accustomed to the scale of the new time. He came out
through one of the now familiar sliding panels upon a plateau of landing