Publisher's Synopsis
WEST KENSINGTON relies for romance more upon the eccentricities of individual residents than upon any variety or suggestiveness in the scenery of its streets, which indeed are mostly mere lines of uniform gray or red houses drearily elongated by constriction. Yet the suburb is too near to London for some relics of a former rusticity not to have survived; and it is refreshing for the casual observer of a city's growth to find here and there a row of old cottages, here and there a Georgian house rising from sooty flower-gardens and shadowed by rusty cedars, occasionally even an open space of building land, among the weeds of which ragged hedgerows and patches of degenerate oats still endure. How Lonsdale Road, where the Caffyns lived, should have come to obtrude itself upon the flimsy architecture of the neighborhood is not so obvious. Situated near what used to be the western terminus of the old brown-and-blue horse-omnibuses, it is a comparatively wide road of detached, double-fronted, three-storied, square houses (so square that after the rows of emaciated residences close by they seem positively squat), built at least thirty years before anybody thought of following the District Railway out here. Each front door is overhung by a heavy portico, the stout pillars of which, painted over and over again according to the purse and fancy of the owner, vary in color from shades of glossy blue and green to drabs and buffs and dingy ivories. The steps, set some ten yards back from the pavement, are flanked by well-grown shrubs; the ground floor is partially below the level of the street, but there are no areas, and only a side entrance marked "Tradesmen" seems to acknowledge the existence of a more humble world.
