teous. Also, she amplified the retort courteous
in divers vivid and unprintable ways.

I never had much talent for repartee, but she
knocked silly what little I had, and I gulped down
my tea a beaten man, while she gloated after me
even as I passed out to the street.

While 300,000 people of London live in one-
room tenements, and 900,000 are illegally and
viciously housed, 38,000 more are registered as
living in common lodging-houses known in the
vernacular as doss-houses. There are many kinds
of doss-houses, but in one thing they are all alike,
from the filthy little ones to the monster big ones
paying five per cent and blatantly lauded by smug
middle-class men who know nothing about them,
and that one thing is their uninhabitableness. By
this I do not mean that the roofs leak or the walls
are draughty; but what I do mean is that life in
them is degrading and unwholesome.

The poor man s hotel, they are often called, but
the phrase is caricature. Not to possess a room to
one s self, in which sometimes to sit alone; to be
forced out of bed willy-nilly, the first thing in the
morning; to engage and pay anew for a bed each
night; and never to have any privacy, surely is a
mode of existence quite different from that of hotel
life.

This must not be considered a sweeping condem-

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v?