x coffee-house had given place to
the open and crowded Aerated Bread Shop for instance, women's clubs had
had their beginning, and an immense development of reading rooms, lounges
and libraries had witnessed to the growth of social confidence. These
promises had by this time attained to their complete fulfilment. The
locked and barred household had passed away.

These people below him belonged, he learnt, to the lower middle class,
the class just above the blue labourers, a class so accustomed in the
Victorian period to feed with every precaution of privacy that its
members, when occasion confronted them with a public meal, would usually
hide their embarrassment under horseplay or a markedly militant
demeanour. But these gaily, if lightly dressed people below, albeit
vivacious, hurried and uncommunicative, were dexterously mannered and
certainly quite at their ease with regard to one another.

He noted a slight significant thing; the table, as far as he could see,
was and remained delightfully neat, there was nothing to parallel the
confusion, the broadcast crumbs, the splashes of viand and condiment, the
overturned drink and displaced ornaments, which would have marked the
stormy progress of the Victorian meal. The table furniture was very
different. There were no ornaments, no flowers, and the table was without
a cloth, being made, he learnt, of a solid substance having the texture
and appearance of damask. He discerned that this damask substance was
patterned with gracefully designed trade advertisements.

In a sort of recess before each diner was a complex apparatus of
porcelain and metal. There was one plate of white porcelain, and by means
of taps for hot and cold volatile fluids the diner washed this himself
between the courses; he also washed his elegant white metal knife and
fork and spoon as occasion required.

Soup and the chemical wine that was the common drink were delivered by
similar taps, and the remaining covers travelled automatically in
tastefully arranged dishes down the table along silver rails. The diner
stopped these and helped himself at his discretion. They appeared at a
little door at one end of the table, and vanished at the other. That turn
of democratic sentiment in decay, that ugly pride of menial souls, which
renders equals loth to wait on one another, was very strong he found
among these people. He was so preoccupied with these details that it was
only as he was leaving the place that