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
at the head of a flight of very broad and gentle steps, with men and
women far more brilliantly dressed than any he had hitherto seen,
ascending and descending. From this position he looked down a vista of
subtle and varied ornament in lustreless white and mauve and purple,
spanned by bridges that seemed wrought of porcelain and filigree, and
terminating far off in a cloudy mystery of perforated screens.
Glancing upward, he saw tier above tier of ascending galleries with faces
looking down upon him. The air was full of the babble of innumerable
voices and of a music that descended from above, a gay and exhilarating
music whose source he did not discover.
The central aisle was thick with people, but by no means uncomfortably
crowded; altogether that assembly must have numbered many thousands.
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