ed it Granville? When Ranny replied
significantly, "I didn't." Then they stopped.

But Granville tickled him only, as it were, on one side. The other side
of Ransome was insensitive. His undeveloped taste was not aware of the
architectural absurdity of Granville, with its perky gable and its sham
porphyry pillar. He could look at it, and yet think of it quite gravely
and with a secret tenderness as his home, and more than all as the home
he had given Violet, the blessed roof and walls that sheltered her.

And all the time, in secret, it was taking hold of him, the delicious
thought of property, of possession, of Granville as a thing that in
twenty years' time would be his own. Brooding over Granville, Ranny's
brain became fertile in ideas. He was always calling out to Violet:
"Vikes! I've got _another_ idea! When he gets all dirty next year I'll
paint him green. That'll give him a distinctive character, if you like."
Or, "How would it be if I was to cover him up all over with creepers,
back and front?" Or, "Some day I'll whip off those tiles and clap him on
a balcony. He'd look O.K. if he only had a balcony over his porch."

His porch was the one thing wrong with Granville, because it wasn't
absolutely and entirely his. The porphyry pillar for instance; he had
only half a share in it; the other half belonged to Number Forty-five;
and you couldn't rightly tell where Number Forty-five's share ended and
his began. Still it wasn't as if anybody ever wanted to swarm up the
pillar. But there was a party wall, and that was a serious thing. It
was so low that a child could clear it at a stride. And when the postman
and errand boys and tradespeople went their rounds, instead of going
down Forty-five's front walk and up Granville's, they all straddled
insolently over the party wall. Ransome said it was "like their bally
cheek," by which he meant that it was an insult to the privacy and
dignity of Granville. And he stopped it by setting a high box, planted
with a perfect little hedge of euonymus, on Granville's half of the top
of the party wall. And he and Violet hid behind the window curtains all
one Saturday afternoon, and watched "the poor johnnies being sold."

There was no end to the fun he was getting out of Granville. Every
evening he hurried home from Woolridge's that he might put in an hour's
work in his garden before supper. He was never tired of digging and
planting and watering the long strip at the back, or of clipp