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immovable and gave access by staircases descending into subterranean
ways to the houses on either side. Right and left were an ascending
series of continuous platforms each of which travelled about five miles
an hour faster than the one internal to it, so that one could step from
platform to platform until one reached the swiftest outer way and so go
about the city. The establishment of the Suzannah Hat Syndicate
projected a vast façade upon the outer way, sending out overhead at
either end an overlapping series of huge white glass screens, on which
gigantic animated pictures of the faces of well-known beautiful living
women wearing novelties in hats were thrown. A dense crowd was always
collected in the stationary central way watching a vast kinematograph
which displayed the changing fashion. The whole front of the building
was in perpetual chromatic change, and all down the façade--four
hundred feet it measured--and all across the street of moving ways,
laced and winked and glittered in a thousand varieties of colour and
lettering the inscription--
SUZANNA! 'ETS! SUZANNA! 'ETS!
A broadside of gigantic phonographs drowned all conversation in the
moving way and roared "hats" at the passer-by, while far down the
street and up, other batteries counselled the public to "walk down for
Suzannah," and queried, "Why don't you buy the girl a hat?"
For the benefit of those who chanced to be deaf--and deafness was not
uncommon in the London of that age, inscriptions of all sizes were
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