"That's right. Try to remember everything. Eat a little more bread. 🔊 What did the reading-room look like?" 🔊

"Much as usual," he at length muttered. 🔊

"Many people there?" 🔊

"Usual sort of number." 🔊

"What did they look like?" 🔊

Soames tried to visualize them. 🔊

"They all," he presently remembered, "looked very like one another." 🔊

My mind took a fearsome leap. 🔊

"All dressed in sanitary woolen?" 🔊

"Yes, I think so. Grayish-yellowish stuff." 🔊

"A sort of uniform?" 🔊 He nodded. 🔊 "With a number on it perhaps—a number on a large disk of metal strapped round the left arm? 🔊 D.K.F. 78,910—that sort of thing?" 🔊 It was even so. 🔊 "And all of them, men and women alike, looking very well cared for? 🔊 Very Utopian, and smelling rather strongly of carbolic, and all of them quite hairless?" 🔊 I was right every time. 🔊 Soames was only not sure whether the men and women were hairless or shorn. 🔊 "I hadn't time to look at them very closely," he explained. 🔊