chiefly was the owner. People had their sleeping rooms, with, it might
be, antechambers, rooms that were always sanitary at least whatever the
degree of comfort and privacy, and for the rest they lived much as many
people had lived in the new-made giant hotels of the Victorian days,
eating, reading, thinking, playing, conversing, all in places of public
resort, going to their work in the industrial quarters of the city or
doing business in their offices in the trading section.

He perceived at once how necessarily this state of affairs had developed
from the Victorian city. The fundamental reason for the modern city had
ever been the economy of co-operation. The chief thing to prevent the
merging of the separate households in his own generation was simply the
still imperfect civilisation of the people, the strong barbaric pride,
passions, and prejudices, the jealousies, rivalries, and violence of the
middle and lower classes, which had necessitated the entire separation
of contiguous households. But the change, the taming of the people, had
been in rapid progress even then. In his brief thirty years of previous
life he had seen an enormous extension of the habit of consuming meals
from home, the casually patronised horse-box coffee-house had given
place to the open and crowded Aerated Bread Shop for instance, women's
clubs had had their beginning, and an immense development of reading
rooms, lounges and libraries had witnessed to the growth of social
confidence. These promises had by this time attained to their complete
fulfillment. The locked and barred household had passed away.

These people below him belonged, he learnt, to the lower middle class,
the class just above the blue labourers, a class so accustomed in the
Victorian period to feed with every precaution of privacy that its
members, when occasion confronted them with a public meal, would
usually hide their embarrassment under horseplay or a markedly militant
demeanour. But these gaily, if lightly dressed people below, albeit
vivacious, hurried and uncommunicative, were dexterously mannered and
certainly quite at their ease with regard to one another.

He noted a slight significant thing; the table, as far as he could see,
was and remained delightfully neat, there was nothing to parallel the
confusion, the broadcast crumbs, the splashes of viand and condiment,
the overturned drink and displaced ornaments, which would have marked
the stormy progress of the Vi