could let, the very thing.  He provided strong-rooms for your savings, and summer quarters for your wife’s furs; conjurers to amuse your guests after dinner, and all the requisites for your daughter’s wedding, from the cake and the silk petticoats to the Viennese band.  His wine-cellars and his specific for the gout were alike famous; so also was his hair-dye....  And, lastly, when the riddle of existence had become too much for your curiosity, Hugo would sell you a pistol by means of which you could solve it.  And he would bury you in a manner first-class, second-class, or third-class, according to your deserts.

And all these feats Hugo managed to organize within the compass of four floors, a basement, and a sub-basement.  Above, were five floors of furnished and unfurnished flats.  ’Will people of wealth consent to live over a shop?’ he had asked himself in considering the possibilities of his palace, and he had replied, ’Yes, if the shop is large enough and the rents are high enough.’  He was right.  His flats were the most sumptuous and the most preposterously expensive in London; and they were never tenantless.  One man paid two thousand a year for a furnished suite.  But what a furnished suite!  The flats had a separate and spectacular entrance on the eastern facade of the building, with a foyer that was always brilliantly lighted, and elevators that rose and sank without intermission day or night.  And on the ninth floor was a special restaurant, with prices to match the rents, and a roof garden, where one of Hugo’s orchestras played every fine summer evening, except Sundays.  (The County Council, mistrusting this aerial combination of music and moonbeams, had granted its license only on the condition that customers should have one night in which to recover from the doubtful influences of the other six.) The restaurant and the roof-garden were a resort excessively fashionable during the season.  The garden gave an excellent view of the dome, where Hugo lived.  But few persons knew that he lived there; in some matters he was very secretive.

That very sultry morning Hugo brooded over the face of his establishment like a spirit doomed to perpetual motion.  For more than two hours he threaded ceaselessly the long galleries where the usual daily crowds of customers, sales-people, shopwalkers, inspectors, sub-managers, managers, and private detectives of both sexes, moved with a strange and unaccustomed languor in a drowsy atmosphere which no system of ventilation could keep below 75 deg.  Fahrenheit.  None but the chiefs of departments had the right to address him as he passed; such was the rule.  He deviated into the counting-house, where two hundred typewriters made their music, and into the annexe containing the stables and coach-houses, where scores of vans and automobiles, and those elegant coupes gratuitously provided by Hugo for the use of important clients, were continually arriving and leaving.  Then he returned to the purchasing multitudes, and plunged therein as into a sea.  At intervals a customer, recognising him, would nudge a friend, and point eagerly.