It seemed to her that Mr.Skellorn and the cottages mysteriously resembled each other in their primness, their smugness, their detestable self-complacency.

Yet those cottages, perhaps thirty in all, had stood for a great deal until Hilda, glancing at them, shattered them with her scorn.

The row was called Freehold Villas: a consciously proud name in a district where much of the land was copyhold and could only change owners subject to the payment of 'fines' and to the feudal consent of a 'court' presided over by the agent of a lord of the manor.
Most of the dwellings were owned by their occupiers, who, each an absolute monarch of the soil, niggled in his sooty garden of an evening amid the flutter of drying shirts and towels.

Freehold Villas symbolized the final triumph of Victorian economics, the apotheosis of the prudent and industrious artisan.

It corresponded with a Building Society Secretary's dream of paradise.