She repented at once.  “I am sorry, Ted,” she said.  “It slipped from me."...

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.  “If you had stayed in the church,” she said afterwards, “you might have helped to alter such things as that.”

At the time he had no answer.

“But,” he said presently as they went back in the tube to their modest Bloomsbury hotel, “if I had stayed in the church I should never have realized things like that.”

(4)