is spectacle held him for a long time. It was as he
watched the table service more immediately beneath, and interspersed
with many questions and answers concerning details, that the
realisation of the full significance of the feast of several thousand
people came to him.

It was his constant surprise to find that points that one might have
expected to strike vividly at the very outset never occurred to him until
some trivial detail suddenly shaped as a riddle and pointed to the
obvious thing he had overlooked. He discovered only now that this
continuity of the city, this exclusion of weather, these vast halls and
ways, involved the disappearance of the household; that the typical
Victorian "Home," the little brick cell containing kitchen and scullery,
living rooms and bedrooms, had, save for the ruins that diversified the
countryside, vanished as surely as the wattle hut. But now he saw what
had indeed been manifest from the first, that London, regarded as a
living place, was no longer an aggregation of houses but a prodigious
hotel, an hotel with a thousand classes of accommodation, thousands of
dining halls, chapels, theatres, markets and places of assembly, a
synthesis of enterprises, of which he chiefly was the owner. People had
their sleeping rooms, with, it might be, antechambers, rooms that were
always sanitary at least whatever the degree of comfort and privacy, and
for the rest they lived much as many people had lived in the new-made
giant hotels of the Victorian days, eating, reading, thinking, playing,
conversing, all in places of public resort, going to their work in the
industrial quarters of the city or doing business in their offices in the
trading section.

He perceived at once how necessarily this state of affairs had developed
from the Victorian city. The fundamental reason for the modern city had
ever been the economy of co-operation. The chief thing to prevent the
merging of the separate households in his own generation was simply the
still imperfect civilisation of the people, the strong barbaric pride,
passions, and prejudices, the jealousies, rivalries, and violence of the
middle and lower classes, which had necessitated the entire separation of
contiguous households. But the change, the taming of the people, had been
in rapid progress even then. In his brief thirty years of previous life
he had seen an enormous extension of the habit of consuming meals from
home, the casually patronised horse-bo