cate to Graham had he entered them fresh from his
nineteenth century life, but already he was growing accustomed to the
scale of the new time. They can scarcely be described as halls and
rooms, seeing that a complicated system of arches, bridges, passages and
galleries divided and united every part of the great space. He came
out through one of the now familiar sliding panels upon a. plateau of
landing at the head of a flight of very broad and gentle steps, with
men and women far more brilliantly dressed than any he had hitherto seen
ascending and descending. From this position he looked down a vista of
intricate ornament in lustreless white and mauve and purple, spanned by
bridges that seemed wrought of porcelain and filigree, and terminating
far off in a cloudy mystery of perforated screens.

Glancing upward, he saw tier above tier of ascending galleries
with faces looking down upon him. The air was full of the babble of
innumerable voices and of a music that descended from above, a gay and
exhilarating music whose source he never discovered.

The central aisle was thick with people, but by no means uncomfortably
crowded; altogether that assembly must have numbered many thousands.
They were brilliantly, even fantastically dressed, the men as fancifully
as the women, for the sobering influence of the Puritan conception of
dignity upon masculine dress had long since passed away. The hair of
the men, too, though it was rarely worn long, was commonly curled in
a manner that suggested the barber, and baldness had vanished from
the earth. Frizzy straight-cut masses that would have charmed Rossetti
abounded, and one gentleman, who was pointed out to Graham under the
mysterious title of an "amorist", wore his hair in two becoming plaits a
la Marguerite. The pigtail was in evidence; it would seem that citizens
of Chinese extraction were no longer ashamed of their race. There was
little uniformity of fashion apparent in the forms of clothing worn. The
more shapely men displayed their symmetry in trunk hose, and here were
puffs and slashes, and there a cloak and there a robe. The fashions of
the days of Leo the Tenth were perhaps the prevailing influence, but
the aesthetic conceptions of the far east were also patent. Masculine
embonpoint, which, in Victorian times, would have been subjected to
the tightly buttoned perils, the ruthless exaggeration of tight-legged
tight-armed evening dress, now formed but the basis of a wealth o