floods or exposed to the smoke of more fortunate districts,

insufficiently supplied with water, and as insanitary as the great fear

of infectious diseases felt by the wealthier classes permitted. In the

twenty-second century, however, the growth of the city storey above

storey, and the coalescence of buildings, had led to a different

arrangement. The prosperous people lived in a vast series of sumptuous

hotels in the upper storeys and halls of the city fabric; the industrial

population dwelt beneath in the tremendous ground-floor and basement, so

to speak, of the place.

In the refinement of life and manners these lower classes differed

little from their ancestors, the East-enders of Queen Victoria's time;

but they had developed a distinct dialect of their own. In these under

ways they lived and died, rarely ascending to the surface except when

work took them there. Since for most of them this was the sort of life

to which they had been born, they found no great misery in such

circumstances; but for people like Denton and Elizabeth, such a plunge

would have seemed more terrible than death.

"And yet what else is there?" asked Elizabeth.

Denton professed not to know. Apart from his own feeling of delicacy, he

was not sure how Elizabeth would like the idea of borrowing on the

strength of her expectations.

The passage from London to Paris even, said Elizabeth, was beyond their

164

Tales of Space and Time