f an idyllic easy-going life. He turned his eyes to the
scene immediately before him again, trying to conceive the big factories
of that intricate maze....

CHAPTER XV

PROMINENT PEOPLE

The state apartments of the Wind Vane Keeper would have astonished Graham
had he entered them fresh from his nineteenth century life, but already
he was growing accustomed to the scale of the new time. He came out
through one of the now familiar sliding panels upon a plateau of landing
at the head of a flight of very broad and gentle steps, with men and
women far more brilliantly dressed than any he had hitherto seen,
ascending and descending. From this position he looked down a vista of
subtle and varied ornament in lustreless white and mauve and purple,
spanned by bridges that seemed wrought of porcelain and filigree, and
terminating far off in a cloudy mystery of perforated screens.

Glancing upward, he saw tier above tier of ascending galleries with faces
looking down upon him. The air was full of the babble of innumerable
voices and of a music that descended from above, a gay and exhilarating
music whose source he did not discover.

The central aisle was thick with people, but by no means uncomfortably
crowded; altogether that assembly must have numbered many thousands. They
were brilliantly, even fantastically dressed, the men as fancifully as
the women, for the sobering influence of the Puritan conception of
dignity upon masculine dress had long since passed away. The hair of the
men, too, though it was rarely worn long, was commonly curled in a
manner that suggested the barber, and baldness had vanished from the
earth. Frizzy straight-cut masses that would have charmed Rossetti
abounded, and one gentleman, who was pointed out to Graham under the
mysterious title of an "amorist," wore his hair in two becoming plaits _a
la_ Marguerite. The pigtail was in evidence; it would seem that citizens
of Chinese extraction were no longer ashamed of their race. There was
little uniformity of fashion apparent in the forms of clothing worn. The
more shapely men displayed their symmetry in trunk hose, and here were
puffs and slashes, and there a cloak and there a robe. The fashions of
the days of Leo the Tenth were perhaps the prevailing influence, but the
aesthetic conceptions of the far east were also patent. Masculine
embonpoint, which, in Victorian times, would have been subjected to the
buttoned perils, the ruthless exaggerati