'Precisely. Here, you're forgetting the token.'

He detached a gold medallion from his watch-chain, and handed it to
Shawn, who departed with it and with the tea-tray.

Two minutes later, having climbed the staircase between the inner and
outer domes, he stood, fully clad in a light-gray suit, on the highest
platform of the immense building, whose occidental façade is the glory
of Sloane Street and one of the marvels of the metropolis. Far above him
a gigantic flag spread its dazzling folds to the sun and the breeze. On
the white ground of the flag, in purple letters seven feet high, was
traced the single word, 'HUGO.'

From his eyrie he could see half the West End of London. Sloane Street
stretched north and south like a ruled line, and along that line two
hurrying processions of black dots approached each other, and met and
vanished below him; they constituted the first division of his army of
three thousand five hundred employés.

He leaned over the balustrade, and sniffed the pure air with exultant,
eager nostrils. He was forty-six. He did not feel forty-six, however. In
common with every man of forty-six, and especially every bachelor of
forty-six, he regarded forty-six as a mere meaningless number, as a
futile and even misleading symbol of chronology. He felt that Time had
made a mistake--that he was not really in the fifth decade, and that his
true, practical working age was about thirty.

Moreover, he was in love, for the first time in his life. Like all men
and all women, he had throughout the whole of his adult existence been
ever secretly preoccupied with thoughts, hopes, aspirations, desires,