ied meats and
game in aspic, puddings and tarts and frosted cakes--every kind of
food-fantasticality imaginable. One might have spent an hour in
studying it, and from top to bottom he would have found nothing simple,
nothing natural. The turkeys had paper curls and rosettes stuck over
them; the hams were covered with a white gelatine, the devilled crabs
with a yellow mayonnaise-and all painted over in pink and green and
black with landscapes and marine views--with "ships and shoes and
sealing-wax and cabbages and kings." The jellied meats and the puddings
were in the shape of fruits and flowers; and there were elaborate works
of art in pink and white confectionery--a barn-yard, for instance, with
horses and cows, and a pump, and a dairymaid--and one or two alligators.

And all this was changed every day! Each morning you might see a
procession of a score of waiters bearing aloft a new supply. Montague
remembered Betty Wyman's remark at their first interview, apropos of
the whipped cream made into little curleques; how his brother had said,
"If Allan were here, he'd be thinking about the man who fixed that
cream, and how long it took him, and how he might have been reading
'The Simple Life'!"

He thought of that now; he stood here and gazed, and wondered about all
the slaves of the lamp who served in this huge temple of luxury. He
looked at the waiters--pale, hollow-chested, harried-looking men: he
imagined the hordes of servants of yet lower kinds, who never emerged
into the light of day; the men who washed the dishes, the men who
carried the garbage, the men who shovelled the coal into the furnaces,
and made the heat and light and power. Pent up in dim cellars, many
stories under ground, and bound for ever to the service of
sensuality--how terrible must be their fate, how unimaginable their
corruption! And they were foreigners; they had come here seeking
liberty. And the masters of the new country had seized them and pent
them here!

From this as a starting-point his thought went on, to the hordes of
toilers in every part of the world, whose fate it was to create the
things which these blind revellers destroyed; the women and children in
countless mills and sweatshops, who spun the cloth, and cut and sewed
it; the girls who made the artificial flowers, who rolled the
cigarettes, who gathered the grapes from the vines; the miners who dug
the coal and the precious metals out of the earth; the men who watched
in ten t