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they moved into their sparsely furnished pink-and-white apartments in a
cheap hotel, there came an outbreak of furious energy on his part, and
then nearly a week of lethargy during which he sulked at home. Through
those days Elizabeth shone like a star, and at the end Denton's misery
found a vent in tears. And then he went out into the city ways again,
and--to his utter amazement--found some work to do.
His standard of employment had fallen steadily until at last it had
reached the lowest level of independent workers. At first he had aspired
to some high official position in the great Flying or Wind Vane or Water
Companies, or to an appointment on one of the General Intelligence
Organisations that had replaced newspapers, or to some professional
partnership, but those were the dreams of the beginning. From that he
had passed to speculation, and three hundred gold "lions" out of
Elizabeth's thousand had vanished one evening in the share market. Now
he was glad his good looks secured him a trial in the position of
salesman to the Suzannah Hat Syndicate, a Syndicate, dealing in ladies'
caps, hair decorations, and hats--for though the city was completely
covered in, ladies still wore extremely elaborate and beautiful hats at
the theatres and places of public worship.
It would have been amusing if one could have confronted a Regent Street
shopkeeper of the nineteenth century with the development of his
establishment in which Denton's duties lay. Nineteenth Way was still
sometimes called Regent Street, but it was now a street of moving
platforms and nearly eight hundred feet wide. The middle space was
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