Toodles was cheerful and all unaware; and that only made the tragedy of it all one shade more black to Montague.  He sat lost in sombre reverie, forgetting his companions, and the blare and glare of the place.

In the centre of this dining-room was a great cone-shaped stand, containing a display of food; and as they strolled out, Montague stopped to look at it.  There were platters garnished with flowers and herbs, and containing roast turkeys and baked hams, jellied meats and game in aspic, puddings and tarts and frosted cakes—­every kind of food-fantasticality imaginable.  One might have spent an hour in studying it, and from top to bottom he would have found nothing simple, nothing natural.  The turkeys had paper curls and rosettes stuck over them; the hams were covered with a white gelatine, the devilled crabs with a yellow mayonnaise-and all painted over in pink and green and black with landscapes and marine views—­with “ships and shoes and sealing-wax and cabbages and kings.”  The jellied meats and the puddings were in the shape of fruits and flowers; and there were elaborate works of art in pink and white confectionery—­a barn-yard, for instance, with horses and cows, and a pump, and a dairymaid—­and one or two alligators.

And all this was changed every day!  Each morning you might see a procession of a score of waiters bearing aloft a new supply.  Montague remembered Betty Wyman’s remark at their first interview, apropos of the whipped cream made into little curleques; how his brother had said, “If Allan were here, he’d be thinking about the man who fixed that cream, and how long it took him, and how he might have been reading ’The Simple Life’!”

He thought of that now; he stood here and gazed, and wondered about all the slaves of the lamp who served in this huge temple of luxury.  He looked at the waiters—­pale, hollow-chested, harried-looking men:  he imagined the hordes of servants of yet lower kinds, who never emerged into the light of day; the men who washed the dishes, the men who carried the garbage, the men who shovelled the coal into the furnaces, and made the heat and light and power.  Pent up in dim cellars, many stories under ground, and bound for ever to the service of sensuality—­how terrible must be their fate, how unimaginable their corruption!  And they were foreigners; they had come here seeking liberty.  And the masters of the new country had seized them and pent them here!

From this as a starting-point his thought went on, to the hordes of toilers in every part of the world, whose fate it was to create the things which these blind revellers destroyed; the women and children in countless mills and sweatshops, who spun the cloth, and cut and sewed it; the girls who made the artificial flowers, who rolled the cigarettes, who gathered the grapes from the vines; the miners who dug the coal and the precious metals out of the earth; the men who watched in ten thousand signal-towers and engines,