for six shillings a week? Impossible! But my landlady, knocking at the
door to learn if I were comfortable, dispelled my doubts.

"Oh yes, sir," she said, in reply to a question. "This street is the
very last. All the other streets were like this eight or ten years ago,
and all the people were very respectable. But the others have driven our
kind out. Those in this street are the only ones left. It's shocking,
sir!"

And then she explained the process of saturation, by which the rental
value of a neighbourhood went up, while its tone went down.

"You see, sir, our kind are not used to crowding in the way the others
do. We need more room. The others, the foreigners and lower-class
people, can get five and six families into this house, where we only get
one. So they can pay more rent for the house than we can afford. It
_is_ shocking, sir; and just to think, only a few years ago all this
neighbourhood was just as nice as it could be."

I looked at her. Here was a woman, of the finest grade of the English
working-class, with numerous evidences of refinement, being slowly
engulfed by that noisome and rotten tide of humanity which the powers
that be are pouring eastward out of London Town. Bank, factory, hotel,
and office building must go up, and the city poor folk are a nomadic
breed; so they migrate eastward, wave upon wave, saturating and degrading
neighbourhood by neighbourhood, driving the better class of workers
before them to pioneer, on the rim of the city, or dragging them down, if
not in the first generation, surely in the second and third.

It is only a question of months when Johnny Upright's street must go. He