wellings were owned by their occupiers, who, each an
absolute monarch of the soil, niggled in his sooty garden of an evening
amid the flutter of drying shirts and towels. Freehold Villas symbolized
the final triumph of Victorian economics, the apotheosis of the prudent
and industrious artisan. It corresponded with a Building Society
Secretary's dream of paradise. And indeed it was a very real
achievement. Nevertheless Hilda's irrational contempt would not admit
this. She saw in Freehold Villas nothing but narrowness (what long
narrow strips of gardens, and what narrow homes all flattened
together!), and uniformity, and brickiness, and polished brassiness, and
righteousness, and an eternal laundry.

From the upper floor of her own home she gazed destructively down upon
all that, and into the chill, crimson eye of the descending sun. Her own
home was not ideal, but it was better than all that. It was one of the
two middle houses of a detached terrace of four houses built by her
grandfather Lessways, the teapot manufacturer; it was the chief of the
four, obviously the habitation of the proprietor of the terrace. One of
the corner houses comprised a grocer's shop, and this house had been
robbed of its just proportion of garden so that the seigneurial
garden-plot might be triflingly larger than the others. The terrace was
not a terrace of cottages, but of houses rated at from twenty-six to
thirty-six pounds a year; beyond the means of artisans and petty
insurance agents and rent-collectors. And further, it was well built,
generously built; and its architecture, though debased, showed some
faint traces of Georgian amenity. It was admittedly the best row of
houses in that newly settled quarter of the town. In coming to it out of
Freehold Villas Mr. Skellorn obviously came to something superior,
wider, more liberal.

Suddenly Hilda heard her mother's voice, in a rather startled
conversational tone, and then another woman speaking; then the voices
died away. Mrs. Lessways had evidently opened the back door to somebody,
and taken her at once into the sitting-room. The occurrence was unusual.
Hilda went softly out on to the landing and listened, but she could
catch nothing more than a faint, irregular murmur. Scarcely had she
stationed herself on the landing when her mother burst out of the
sitting-room, and called loudly:

"Hilda!" And again in an instant, very impatiently and excitedly, long
before Hilda could possibly have a