fences which separate one garden or yard from the other. There is no
privacy at all! To me the manner in which your poorer classes are housed
in the suburbs, packed closely together in flimsy buildings, where every
sound can be heard, suggests a form of socialism--communism, or perhaps
rather the phalansterian system.'

But Earlsfield was already passed, and we were reaching Wimbledon. Here
M. Zola's impressions changed. True, he did not have occasion to
perambulate what he would doubtless have called the 'phalansterian'
streets of new South Wimbledon. I spared him the sight of the chess-board
of bricks and mortar into which the speculative builder has turned acre
after acre north of Merton High Street. But the Hill Road, the Broadway,
the Worple Road, and the various turnings that climb towards the Ridgeway
pleased him. And he commented very favourably on the shops in the
Broadway and the Hill Road, which in the waning sunshine still looked gay
and bright. At every moment he stopped to examine something. Such
displays of fruit, and fish, poultry, meat, and provisions of all kinds;
the drapers' windows all aglow with summer fabrics, and those of the
jewellers coruscating with gold and gems. Then the public-houses
--dignified by the name of hotels, though I explained that they had
no hotel accommodation--bespoke all the wealth of a powerful trade.

There was an imposing bank, too, and a stylish carriage builder's, with
furniture shops, stationers, pastrycooks, hairdressers, ironmongers, and
so forth, whose displays testified to the prosperity of the town. Again
and again did M. Zola express the opinion that these Wimbledon shops were
by far superior to such as one would find in a French town of
corresponding size and at a similar distance from the capital.

We sauntered up and down the Hill Road, looking in at the Free Library on