nsition
stage of the metropolis anywhere from Westchester to the sea.

Altered for business purposes, basements displayed signs and
merchandise of bootmakers, dealers in oriental porcelains, rare
prints, silverware; parlour windows modified into bay windows, sheeted
with plate-glass, exposed, perhaps, feminine headgear, or an expensive
model gown or two, or the sign of a real-estate man, or of an
upholsterer.

Above the parlour floors lived people of one sort or another;
furnished and unfurnished rooms and suites prevailed; and the
brownstone monotony was already indented along the building line by
brand-new constructions of Indiana limestone, behind the glittering
plate-glass of which were to be seen reticent displays of artistic
furniture, modern and antique oil paintings, here and there the
lace-curtained den of some superior ladies' hair-dresser, where
beautifying also was accomplished at a price, alas!

Halfway between Sixth Avenue and Fifth, on the north side of the
street, an enterprising architect had purchased half a dozen squatty,
three-storied houses, set back from the sidewalk behind grass-plots.
These had been lavishly stuccoed and transformed into abodes for those
irregulars in the army of life known as "artists."

In the rear the back fences had been levelled; six corresponding
houses on the next street had been purchased; a sort of inner court
established, with a common grass-plot planted with trees and
embellished by a number of concrete works of art, battered statues,
sundials, and well-curbs.

Always the army of civilisation trudges along screened, flanked, and
tagged after by life's irregulars, who cannot or will not conform to
routine. And these are always roaming around seeking their own
cantonments, where, for a while, they seem content to dwell at the end
of one more aimless etape through the world--not in regulation
barracks, but in regions too unconventional, too inconvenient to
attract others.

Of this sort was the collection of squatty houses, forming a
"community," where, in the neighbourhood of other irregulars, Garret
Barres dwelt; and into the lighted entrance of which he now turned,
still exhilarated by his meeting with Thessalie Dunois.

The architectural agglomeration was known as Dragon Court--a faience
Fu-dog above the electric light over the green entrance door
furnishing that priceless idea--a Fu-dog now veiled by mesh-wire to
provide against the indiscretions of sparrows