Not a mile away we may come to a very respectable suburb of the average type; and what is said of it may apply in some degree to a provincial or country town or, at least, the application can easily be made.  The school probably stands at the top corner of a road of houses rented, at L25 to L35 per annum, with gardens in front and behind.  The road generally runs into a main road with shops and traffic.  Here and there in the residential road are little oases of shops, patronised by the neighbourhood, and some of the children may live over these.  The home life is more ordinary and needs less descriptive detail, but there are some features that must be considered.  The decencies, not to say refinements of eating, sleeping and washing are taken for granted:  there is often a bath-room and always a kitchen.  The father’s occupation may be local, but a good many fathers will go to town; there is generally a family holiday to the sea, or less often to the country.  In the house the degree of refinement varies; there are nearly always pictures of a sort, books of a sort, and the children are supplied with toys of a sort.  They visit each other’s houses, and the observances of social life are kept variously.  Often the horizon is very narrow; the mother’s interest is very local and timid; the father’s business life may be absolutely apart from his home life and never mentioned there.  The family conversation while quite amiable and agreeable may be round very few topics, and the vocabulary, while quite respectable, may be most limited.  Children’s questions may be put aside as either trivial or unsuitable.  In one sense the slum child may be said to have a broader background, the realities of life are bare to him on their most sordid side, there is neither mystery nor beauty around life, or death, or the natural affections.  The suburban child may on the contrary be balked and restricted so that unnecessary mystery gives an unwholesome interest to these things and conventionality a dishonest reserve.

A suburb of this type is described by Beresford in Housemates:—­“In such districts (as Gospel Oak) I am depressed by the flatness of an awful monotony.  The slums vex me far less.  There I find adventure and jest whatever the squalor; the marks of the primitive struggle through dirt and darkness towards release.  Those horrible lines of moody, complacent streets represent not struggle, but the achievement of a worthless aspiration.  The houses, with their deadly similarity, their smug, false exteriors, their conformity to an ideal which is typified by their poor imitative decoration, could only be inhabited by people who have no thought or desire for expression....  The dwellers in such districts are cramped into the vice of their environment.  Their homes represent the dull concession to a state rule; and their lives take tone from the grey, smoke-grimed repetition of one endlessly repeated design.  The same foolish ornamentation on every house reiterates