"...

He called it camping, but the house they had found in Pembury Road,
Notting Hill, was more darkened and less airy than any camp. Neither he
nor his wife had ever had any experience of middle-class house-hunting
or middle-class housekeeping before, and they spent three of the most
desolating days of their lives in looking for this cheap and modest
shelter for their household possessions. Hitherto life had moved them
from one established and comfortable home to another; their worst
affliction had been the modern decorations of the Palace at Princhester,
and it was altogether a revelation to them to visit house after house,
ill-lit, ill-planned, with dingy paint and peeling wallpaper, kitchens
for the most part underground, and either without bathrooms or with
built-out bathrooms that were manifestly grudging afterthoughts, such
as harbour the respectable middle classes of London. The house agents
perceived intimations of helplessness in their manner, adopted a
"rushing" method with them strange to people who had hitherto lived in
a glowing halo of episcopal dignity. "Take it or leave it," was the note
of those gentlemen; "there are always people ready for houses." The
line that property in land and houses takes in England, the ex-bishop
realized, is always to hold up and look scornful. The position of the
land-owning, house-owning class in a crowded country like England is
ultra-regal. It is under no obligation to be of use, and people are
obliged to get down to the land somewhere. They cannot conduct business
and rear families in the air. England's necessity is the landlord's
opportunity....

Scrope began to generalize about this, and develop a new and sincerer
streak of socialism in his ideas. "The church has been very remiss,"
he said, as he and Lady Ella stared at the basement "breakfast room" of
their twenty-seventh dismal possibility. "It should have insisted far
more than it has done upon the landlord's responsibility. No one should
tolerate the offer of such a house as this--at such a rent--to decent
people. It is unrighteous."

At the house agent's he asked in a cold, intelligent ruling-class voice,
the name of the offending landlord.

"It's all the property of the Ecclesiastical Commissioners that side of
the railway," said the agent, picking his teeth with a pin. "Lazy
lot. Dreadfully hard to get 'em to do anything. Own some of the worst
properties in London."

Lady Ella saw things differently again