But to the millionaire's dwelling, located at that period in Harley Street, Cavendish-Square, the novelist is hardly more polite: "Like unexceptionable society" (he says), "the opposing rows of houses in Harley Street were very grim with one another. Indeed, the mansions and their inhabitants were so much alike in that respect, that the people were often to be found drawn up on opposite sides of dinner-tables, in the shade of their own loftiness, staring at the other side of the way with the dullness of the houses. Everybody knows how like the street the two dinner-rows of people who take their stand by the street will be. The expressionless uniform twenty houses, all to be knocked and rung at in the same form, all approachable by the same dull steps, all fended off by the same pattern of railing, all with the same impracticable fire-escapes, the same inconvenient fixtures in their heads, and everything without exception to be taken at a high valuation--who has not dined with these? The house so drearily out of repair, the occasional bow-window, the stuccoed house, the newly-fronted house, the corner house with nothing but angular rooms, the house with the blinds always down, the house with the hatchment always up, the house where the collector has called for one quarter of an Idea, and found nobody at home--who has not dined with these?" Dickens, on the whole, is kinder to his thieves' kitchens and debtors' prisons, even to Fagin and his crew; for he allows them, at any rate, to boast occasionally of an "Idea." But the "Smart Set," with the plutocrats and the Merdles, has moved westward since the days of the Early-Victorian novelists; and "Harley Street, Cavendish Square," is now mainly medical.