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floods or exposed to the smoke of more fortunate districts,
insufficiently supplied with water, and as insanitary as the great fear
of infectious diseases felt by the wealthier classes permitted. In the
twenty-second century, however, the growth of the city storey above
storey, and the coalescence of buildings, had led to a different
arrangement. The prosperous people lived in a vast series of sumptuous
hotels in the upper storeys and halls of the city fabric; the industrial
population dwelt beneath in the tremendous ground-floor and basement, so
to speak, of the place.
In the refinement of life and manners these lower classes differed
little from their ancestors, the East-enders of Queen Victoria's time;
but they had developed a distinct dialect of their own. In these under
ways they lived and died, rarely ascending to the surface except when
work took them there. Since for most of them this was the sort of life
to which they had been born, they found no great misery in such
circumstances; but for people like Denton and Elizabeth, such a plunge
would have seemed more terrible than death.
"And yet what else is there?" asked Elizabeth.
Denton professed not to know. Apart from his own feeling of delicacy, he
was not sure how Elizabeth would like the idea of borrowing on the
strength of her expectations.
The passage from London to Paris even, said Elizabeth, was beyond their
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