cannot tell. They tell one another. There are socialistic
dreams--anarchy even! Agitators will get to work among them. I take
it--I have always taken it--that my foremost duty is to fight against
popular discontent. Why should people be made unhappy?"

"I wonder," said Graham thoughtfully. "But there are a great many things
I want to know."

Lincoln, who had stood watching Graham's face throughout the
conversation, intervened. "There are others," he said in an undertone.

The Surveyor-General of schools gesticulated himself away. "Perhaps,"
said Lincoln, intercepting a casual glance, "you would like to know some
of these ladies?"

The daughter of the Manager of the Piggeries of the European Food Trust
was a particularly charming little person with red hair and animated
blue eyes. Lincoln left him awhile to converse with her, and she
displayed herself as quite an enthusiast for the "dear old times,"
as she called them, that had seen the beginning of his trance. As
she talked she smiled, and her eyes smiled in a manner that demanded
reciprocity.

"I have tried," she said, "countless times--to imagine those old
romantic days. And to you they are memories. How strange and crowded the
world must seem to you! I have seen photographs and pictures of the old
times, the little isolated houses built of bricks made out of burnt mud
and all black with soot from your fires, the railway bridges, the simple
advertisements, the solemn savage Puritanical men in strange black
coats and those tall hats of theirs, iron railway trains on iron bridges
overhead, horses and cattle, and even dogs running half wild about the
streets. And suddenly, you have come into this!"

"Into this," said Graham.

"Out of your life--out of all that was familiar."

"The old life was not a happy one," said Graham. "I do not regret that."

She looked at him quickly. There was a brief pause. She sighed
encouragingly. "No?"

"No," said Graham. "It was a little life--and unmeaning. But this--.
We thought the world complex and crowded and civilised enough. Yet I
see--although in this world I am barely four days old--looking back on
my own time, that it was a queer, barbaric time--the mere beginning of
this new order. The mere beginning of this new order. You will find it
hard to understand how little I know."

"You may ask me what you like," she said, smiling at him.

"Then tell me who these people are. I'm still very much in the dark
about them. It'