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full of this sensation of escape; even to think of the underways was
intolerable; only after many months could she begin to recall with
sympathy the faded women who were still below there, murmuring scandals
and reminiscences and folly, and tapping away their lives.
Her choice of the apartments they presently took expressed the vehemence
of her release. They were rooms upon the very verge of the city; they
had a roof space and a balcony upon the city wall, wide open to the sun
and wind, the country and the sky.
And in that balcony comes the last scene in this story. It was a summer
sunsetting, and the hills of Surrey were very blue and clear. Denton
leant upon the balcony regarding them, and Elizabeth sat by his side.
Very wide and spacious was the view, for their balcony hung five hundred
feet above the ancient level of the ground. The oblongs of the Food
Company, broken here and there by the ruins--grotesque little holes and
sheds--of the ancient suburbs, and intersected by shining streams of
sewage, passed at last into a remote diapering at the foot of the
distant hills. There once had been the squatting-place of the children
of Uya. On those further slopes gaunt machines of unknown import worked
slackly at the end of their spell, and the hill crest was set with
stagnant wind vanes. Along the great south road the Labour Company's
field workers in huge wheeled mechanical vehicles, were hurrying back to
their meals, their last spell finished. And through the air a dozen
little private aëroplanes sailed down towards the city. Familiar scene
as it was to the eyes of Denton and Elizabeth, it would have filled the
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