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Lucknow Mansions were, so to speak, on a lower platform of that hill of houses, of which Himylaya Mansions might be called the peak. Mr. Flambeau's semi-official flat was on the ground floor, and presented in every way a marked contrast to the American machinery and cold hotel-like luxury of the flat of the Silent Service.

It was in the more than usually hotel-like drawing-room of their mutual hotel. People were having tea, and the band was playing. There was a jangle of voices, the jingle of a musical comedy, the movement of waiters.

It had become bitterness to him to enter the gates of the Villa d'Orsay. His nerves were so wrought up that to look about the magnificent but too palace-like, too hotel-like rooms was to struggle with a longing to run amuck and pause not until he had reduced the splendor to smithereens.

A thing Graham had already learnt, and which he found very hard to imagine, was that nearly all the towns in the country, and almost all the villages, had disappeared. Here and there only, he understood, some gigantic hotel-like edifice stood amid square miles of some single cultivation and preserved the name of a town as Bournemouth, Wareham, or Swanage.

"It's a good-sized house;" said the owner; "nothing very particular, as houses are built now-a-days." "Damp; I should say?" "I think not. I have never lived here much myself; but I have not heard that it is considered so." "I guess it's damp. Very lonely; isn't it?" "We like to have our society inside, among ourselves, in the country." "Keep a sort of hotel-like?" suggested Mr. Gotobed.

The scarlet coverings on the furniture, the red curtains, the light moquette carpet with white ground and gay flowers, the white and gold of the woodwork, the gilt bronze clock and candelabra, the tables and cabinets in marquetry and buhl, are all precisely alike in each, and all wear the same hotel-like look and lack of individuality.

A thing Graham had already learnt, and which he found very hard to imagine, was that nearly all the towns in the country, and almost all the villages, had disappeared. Here and there only, he understood, some gigantic hotel-like edifice stood amid square miles of some single cultivation and preserved the name of a town as Bournemouth, Wareham, or Swanage.