ulder, and looked at me with a
sort of glad scrutiny. She seemed to hesitate, and then pecked little
kiss off my cheek.

"You're a man, George," she said, as she released me, and continued to
look at me for a while.

Their menage was one of a very common type in London. They occupied what
is called the dining-room floor of a small house, and they had the use
of a little inconvenient kitchen in the basement that had once been
scullery. The two rooms, bedroom behind and living room in front, were
separated by folding-doors that were never now thrown back, and indeed,
in the presence of a visitor, not used at all. There was of course no
bathroom or anything of that sort available, and there was no water
supply except to the kitchen below. My aunt did all the domestic work,
though she could have afforded to pay for help if the build of the place
had not rendered that inconvenient to the pitch of impossibility. There
was no sort of help available except that of indoor servants, for whom
she had no accommodation. The furniture was their own; it was partly
secondhand, but on the whole it seemed cheerful to my eye, and my aunt's
bias for cheap, gay-figured muslin had found ample score. In many ways
I should think it must have been an extremely inconvenient and cramped
sort of home, but at the time I took it, as I was taking everything, as
being there and in the nature of things. I did not see the oddness of
solvent decent people living in a habitation so clearly neither designed
nor adapted for their needs, so wasteful of labour and so devoid of
beauty as this was, and it is only now as I describe this that I find
myself thinking of the essential absurdity of an intelligent community
living in such makeshift homes. It strikes me now as the next thing to
wearing second-hand clothes.

You see it was a natural growth, part of that system to which
Bladesover, I hold, is the key. There are wide regions of London, miles
of streets of houses, that appear to have been originally designed for
prosperous-middle-class homes of the early Victorian type. There must
have been a perfect fury of such building in the thirties, forties, and
fifties. Street after street must have been rushed into being, Campden
Town way, Pentonville way, Brompton way, West Kensington way in the
Victoria region and all over the minor suburbs of the south side.

I am doubtful if many of these houses had any long use as the residences
of single families if from