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gaily-dressed men and women. He nodded to an acquaintance--it was not in
those days etiquette to talk before breakfast--and seated himself on one
of these chairs, and in a few seconds he had been carried to the doors
of a lift, by which he descended to the great and splendid hall in which
his breakfast would be automatically served.
It was a very different meal from a Victorian breakfast. The rude
masses of bread needing to be carved and smeared over with animal fat
before they could be made palatable, the still recognisable fragments of
recently killed animals, hideously charred and hacked, the eggs torn
ruthlessly from beneath some protesting hen,--such things as these,
though they constituted the ordinary fare of Victorian times, would have
awakened only horror and disgust in the refined minds of the people of
these latter days. Instead were pastes and cakes of agreeable and
variegated design, without any suggestion in colour or form of the
unfortunate animals from which their substance and juices were derived.
They appeared on little dishes sliding out upon a rail from a little box
at one side of the table. The surface of the table, to judge by touch
and eye, would have appeared to a nineteenth-century person to be
covered with fine white damask, but this was really an oxidised metallic
surface, and could be cleaned instantly after a meal. There were
hundreds of such little tables in the hall, and at most of them were
other latter-day citizens singly or in groups. And as Mwres seated
himself before his elegant repast, the invisible orchestra, which had
been resting during an interval, resumed and filled the air with music.
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