one of the General Intelligence
Organisations that had replaced newspapers, or to some professional
partnership, but those were the dreams of the beginning. From that he
had passed to speculation, and three hundred gold "lions" out of
Elizabeth's thousand had vanished one evening in the share market. Now
he was glad his good looks secured him a trial in the position of
salesman to the Suzannah Hat Syndicate, a Syndicate, dealing in ladies'
caps, hair decorations, and hats--for though the city was completely
covered in, ladies still wore extremely elaborate and beautiful hats at
the theatres and places of public worship.

It would have been amusing if one could have confronted a Regent Street
shopkeeper of the nineteenth century with the development of his
establishment in which Denton's duties lay. Nineteenth Way was still
sometimes called Regent Street, but it was now a street of moving
platforms and nearly eight hundred feet wide. The middle space was
immovable and gave access by staircases descending into subterranean
ways to the houses on either side. Right and left were an ascending
series of continuous platforms each of which travelled about five miles
an hour faster than the one internal to it, so that one could step from
platform to platform until one reached the swiftest outer way and so go
about the city. The establishment of the Suzannah Hat Syndicate
projected a vast _facade_ upon the outer way, sending out overhead at
either end an overlapping series of huge white glass screens, on which
gigantic animated pictures of the faces of well-known beautiful living
women wearing novelties in hats were thrown. A dense crowd was always
collected in the stationary central way watching a vast kinematograph
which displayed the changing fashion. The whole front of the building
was in perpetual chromatic change, and all down the _facade_--four
hundred feet it measured--and all across the street of moving ways,
laced and winked and glittered in a thousand varieties of colour and
lettering the inscription--

SUZANNA! 'ETS! SUZANNA! 'ETS!

A broadside of gigantic phonographs drowned all conversation in the
moving way and roared "_hats_" at the passer-by, while far down the
street and up, other batteries counselled the public to "walk down for
Suzannah," and queried, "Why _don't_ you buy the girl a hat?"

For the benefit of those who chanced to be deaf--and deafness was not
uncommon in the London of that age, inscript