rose steadily towards two hundred miles an hour. And by the time this

revolution was accomplished, a parallel revolution had transformed the

ever-growing cities. Before the development of practical science the

fogs and filth of Victorian times vanished. Electric heating replaced

fires (in 2013 the lighting of a fire that did not absolutely consume

its own smoke was made an indictable nuisance), and all the city ways,

all public squares and places, were covered in with a recently invented

glass-like substance. The roofing of London became practically

continuous. Certain short-sighted and foolish legislation against tall

buildings was abolished, and London, from a squat expanse of petty

houses--feebly archaic in design--rose steadily towards the sky. To the

municipal responsibility for water, light, and drainage, was added

another, and that was ventilation.

But to tell of all the changes in human convenience that these two

hundred years brought about, to tell of the long foreseen invention of

flying, to describe how life in households was steadily supplanted by

life in interminable hotels, how at last even those who were still

concerned in agricultural work came to live in the towns and to go to

and fro to their work every day, to describe how at last in all England

only four towns remained, each with many millions of people, and how

there were left no inhabited houses in all the countryside: to tell all

this would take us far from our story of Denton and his Elizabeth. They

had been separated and reunited, and still they could not marry. For

Denton--it was his only fault--had no money. Neither had Elizabeth until

she was twenty-one, and as yet she was only eighteen. At twenty-one all

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Tales of Space and Time