Row or Warple Way. Skimp as he would in
personal expenditure, on the house basis the two ends of Ranny's income
simply _wouldn't_ meet.

All the same, he began looking for the house. The idea of the house, the
desire for the house worked in his brain like a passion; the more
impossible it was, the more ungovernable, the more irresistible he found
it.

And, as he wandered forth on that adventure, seeking for a house, one
Saturday afternoon, accompanied by Violet, Ranny fell into the hands of
the Speculative Builder.

Not very far from Wandsworth, in the green pasturelands of Southfields,
that great magician was already casting into bricks and mortar his
tremendous dream--the city of dreams, the Paradise of Little Clerks.

As yet he had called into being only a few streets of his city,
stretching eastward and southward into the green plain. About it,
southward and eastward, there lay acres of naked earth upturned, torn
and tamed to his hand. Beyond were the fields with their tall elms,
unbroken, virgin, mournful in their last beauty, as they waited for the
ax and pick.

He had done terrible things to the green earth, that speculative
builder, but you could not say of him that he had shut out the sky. The
city ran very low upon the ground in street after street of diminutive
two-storied houses. Each house was joined on to the next, porch to porch
and bow window to bow window, alternating in an endless series, a
machine-made pattern that repeated; a pattern monotonous and yet
fantastic in its mingling of purple, white, and red. Each had the same
little mat of grass laid before each bow window, the same little
red-tiled path from gate to front door, the same front door decorated
with elaborate paneling and panes of colored glass, the same little
machine-made iron gate, the same low red wall and iron railing and
privet hedge; so indistinguishably, so maddeningly alike were all these
diminutive houses. Each roof had the same purple slates, each roof tree
the same red earthwork edging it like a lace; the same red tiles roofed
each porch and faced each gable and the space between the stories. Only
when your eyes became accustomed to the endless running pattern could
you trace it clearly, grasp the detail, note that every two bow windows
were separated by one rain pipe, every two porches sustained by one
pillar, one diminutive magnificent purple pillar, simulating porphyry
and crowned with a rich Corinthian capital in frees