Presently, indeed, we emerged from the cutting, and fields were seen on either hand. One could breathe at last. But as we approached Earlsfield Station all M. Zola's attention was given to a long row of low-lying houses whose yards and gardens extend to the railway line. Now and again a trim patch of ground was seen; here, too, there was a little glass-house, there an attempt at an arbour. But litter and rubbish were only too often apparent. 'This, I suppose,' said the novelist, 'is what you call a London slum invading the country? You tell me that only a part of the bourgeoisie cares for flats, and that among the lower middle class and the working class each family prefers to rent its own little house. Is this for the sake of privacy? If so, I see no privacy here. Leaving out the question of being overlooked from passing trains, observe the open four-foot 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 our way. Then, on passing the Alexandra Road, I explained to Desmoulin that he would sleep there, at No. 20, where Wareham has a local office and where his managing clerk, Everson by name, resides.