forward no backward. Graham noticed what
appeared to him to be a high proportion of women among the speculators,
and was reminded again of the economical independence of their sex. They
seemed remarkably well able to take care of themselves in the crowd,
using their elbows with particular skill, as he learnt to his cost.
One curly-headed person caught in the pressure for a space, looked
steadfastly at him several times, almost as if she recognized him, and
then, edging deliberately towards him, touched his hand with her arm in
a scarcely accidental manner, and made it plain by a look as ancient as
Chaldea that he had found favour in her eyes. And then a lank,
grey-bearded man, perspiring copiously in a noble passion of self-help,
blind to all earthly things save that glaring, bait, thrust between them
in a cataclysmal rush towards that alluring "x 5 pr. G."

"I want to get out of this," said Graham to Asano. "This is not what
I came to see. Show me the workers. I want to see the people in blue.
These parasitic lunatics--"

He found himself wedged in a struggling mass c people, and this hopeful
sentence went unfinished.

CHAPTER XXI. THE UNDER SIDE

From the Business Quarter they presently passed by the running ways into
a remote quarter of the city, where the bulk of the manufactures was
done. On their way the platforms crossed the Thames twice, and passed in
a broad viaduct across one of the great roads that entered the city
from the North. In both cases his impression was swift and in both
very vivid. The river was a broad wrinkled glitter of black sea water,
overarched by buildings, and vanishing either way into a blackness
starred with receding lights. A string of black barges passed seaward,
manned by blue-clad men. The road was a long and very broad and high
tunnel, along which big-wheeled machines drove noiselessly and swiftly.
Here, too, the distinctive blue of the Labour Company was in abundance.
The smoothness of the double tracks, the largeness and the lightness
of the big pneumatic wheels in proportion to the vehicular body, struck
Graham most vividly. One lank and very high carriage with longitudinal
metallic rods hung with the dripping carcasses of many hundred sheep
arrested his attention unduly. Abruptly the edge of the archway cut and
blotted out the picture.

Presently they left the way and descended by a lift and traversed a
passage that sloped downward, and so came to a descending lift again