driven our kind out. Those on 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 neighborhood 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
neighborhood 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 human
ity 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 neigh
borhood by t neighborhood, 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 realizes it himself.

[[28]]

p027 _ -chap- _ toc-1 _ p028w _ toc-2 _ +chap+ _ p029

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