In a paroxysm the music expires. The effect is as disconcerting as though the mills of God had stopped. Applause, hearty and prolonged, resounds in the bowels of the earth.. . . You learn that the organism exists because people really like it.
This is a fearful and a romantic place. Those artists who do not tingle to the romance of it are dead and have forgotten to be buried. The romance of it rises grandiosely storey beyond storey. For you must know that while you are dining in the depths, the courtesans, and their possessors are dining in the skies. And the most romantic and impressive thing about it all is the invisible secret thoughts, beneath the specious bravery, of the uncountable multitude gathered together under the spell of the brains that invented the organism. Can you not look through the transparent faces of the young men with fine waistcoats and neglected boots, and of the young women with concocted hats and insecure gay blouses, and of the waiters whose memories are full of Swiss mountains and Italian lakes and German beer gardens, and of the violinist who was proclaimed a Kubelik at the Conservatoire and who now is carelessly pronounced “jolly good” by eaters of beefsteaks? Can you not look through and see the wonderful secret pre-occupations? If so, you can also pierce walls and floors, and see clearly into the souls of the cooks and the sub-cooks, and the cellar-men, and the commissionaires in the rain, and the washers-up. They are all there, including the human beings with loves and ambitions who never do anything for ever, and ever but wash up. These are wistful, but they are not more wistful than the seraphim and cherubim of the upper floors. The place is grandiose and imposing; it has the dazzle of extreme success; but when you have stared it down it is wistful enough to make you cry.
Accidentally your eye rests on the gorgeous frieze in front of you, and after a few moments, among the complex scrollwork and interlaced Cupids, you discern a monogram, not large, not glaring, not leaping out at you, but concealed in fact rather modestly! You decipher the monogram. It contains the initials of the limited company paying forty per cent, and also of the very men whose brains invented the organism. They are men. They may be great men: they probably are; but they are men.