built over with small houses of
polished mahogany and plate glass. Through the plate-glass fronts--they
were more than windows--I could see the furniture of the houses, rolltop
desks of mahogany, broad mahogany tables, chairs and high stools. All
the mahogany was very highly polished. The citizens of this town flitted
from one glass-fronted house to another. They met in narrow streets and
spoke to each other with grave dignity. They spoke in four languages,
and English was the one used least. From the remoter parts of the
place, the slums, if such a polished town has slums, came the sound of
typewriters worked with extreme rapidity. The manual labourers, in this
as in every civilised community, are kept out of sight. Only the sound
of their toil is allowed to remind the other classes of their happier
lot. Some of the citizens--I took them to be men of very high standing,
privy counsellors or magistrates--held cigars in their mouths as they
walked about. These cigars are badges of office, like the stripes on
soldiers' coats. No one was actually smoking.

Gorman was our spokesman. He explained who we were and what we wanted.
We were handed over to a clerk. I suppose he was a clerk, but to me he
seemed a gentleman in waiting of some mysterious monarch, or--my feeling
wavered--one of the inferior priests of a strange cult. He led us
through doors into a large room, impressively empty and silent. There
for a minute we left while he tapped reverently at another door. The
supreme moment arrived. We passed into the inmost shrine where Ascher
sat. My spirit quailed.

Every great profession has its own way of hypnotising the souls of
simple men. Indeed I think that professions are accounted great in
accordance with their power of impressing on the world a sense of their
mysteriousness. Ecclesiastics, those of them who know their business,
build altars in dim recesses of vast buildings, light them with
flickering tapers, and fill the air with clouds of stupefying incense
smoke. Surgeons and dentists allow us fleeting glimpses of bright steel
instruments, very strangely shaped. It is contrived that we see them in
a cold, clear light, the light of scientific relentlessness. There is a
suggestion of torture, not brutal but exquisitely refined, of perfected
pain, achieved by the stimulation of recondite nerves of very delicate
sensibility. Lawyers wear archaic robes and use a strange language in
their mysteries, conveying to us a bel