Good heavens! And was this the era of the Conquest that I had hoped
to see! I had always taken for granted, I do not know why, that
humanity was destined to move forward. This picture of what seemed
desolation on the ruins of our civilisation rendered me almost
speechless.

There were little benches placed here and there on the street. We
sat down.

"Improved, isn't it," said man in asbestos, "since the days when
you remember it?"

He seemed to speak quite proudly.

I gasped out a question.

"Where are the street cars and the motors?"

"Oh, done away with long ago," he said; "how awful they must have been.
The noise of them!" and his asbestos clothes rustled with a shudder.

"But how do you get about?"

"We don't," he answered. "Why should we? It's just the same being
here as being anywhere else." He looked at me with an infinity of
dreariness in his face.

A thousand questions surged into my mind at once. I asked one of the
simplest.