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the property of her mother would come to her, for that was the custom of
the time. She did not know that it was possible to anticipate her
fortune, and Denton was far too delicate a lover to suggest such a
thing. So things stuck hopelessly between them. Elizabeth said that she
was very unhappy, and that nobody understood her but Denton, and that
when she was away from him she was wretched; and Denton said that his
heart longed for her day and night. And they met as often as they could
to enjoy the discussion of their sorrows.
They met one day at their little seat upon the flying stage. The precise
site of this meeting was where in Victorian times the road from
Wimbledon came out upon the common. They were, however, five hundred
feet above that point. Their seat looked far over London. To convey the
appearance of it all to a nineteenth-century reader would have been
difficult. One would have had to tell him to think of the Crystal
Palace, of the newly built "mammoth" hotels--as those little affairs
were called--of the larger railway stations of his time, and to imagine
such buildings enlarged to vast proportions and run together and
continuous over the whole metropolitan area. If then he was told that
this continuous roof-space bore a huge forest of rotating wind-wheels,
he would have begun very dimly to appreciate what to these young people
was the commonest sight in their lives.
To their eyes it had something of the quality of a prison, and they were
talking, as they had talked a hundred times before, of how they might
escape from it and be at last happy together: escape from it, that is,
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