less noble title, is of a different
sort. He holds that what we see and breathe, especially when young, we
are. His children, then, must have a quite uncommon setting; not grown
like the sordid brats in 245 "desirable villas" adjoining. No, they
must live where there is air and a big back-yard patch; where the word
garden throws a soft glamour over muddied and unfinished roads; where
everything is beautiful and man himself is not so vile.

For, after all, he asks, what really wicked man would ever trouble to
live out at a tube's end? No! Vice ever lurks among the fogs and
shrubless rabbit-warrens of mid-London. It would not flourish in a
garden suburb.

So out he goes, and sees to it that his house shall have something
different from all the other small white dwellings round about him. An
architect might say that there was neither use nor fitness in his
timbered turret at the north-east corner, but he himself knows just why
it is there. He knows that he has flung his little pebble, all he can
avail, upon the heap that some day, we all hope, will crush the
soul-destroying isms out of life, and make of man, not a type in
monotone, but a great hive of multi-coloured individuals.

So far, so good; but more remains to tell.

He settles proudly underneath his turret and waits for the great change
to start. The neighbours call and he discovers they are cultured.
They are very cultured. And he--with a sick horror he knows at length
that he is not. All these people here have something different, not a
mere turret--something different about themselves. Menzies believes
that eating sheep is murder in the sight of Heaven, and the same with
cows. Du Cane will not let his children wear boots, because the notion
is not Greek. Farren is convinced that you must sleep with your feet
to the south and your head, of course, in the opposite direction.
Blythe-Egerton believes in ghosts but says they can't have clothes.
Jerningham lives next the golf club house, an envied site, and holds
success in games has always been the first precursor of a nation's
downfall. Escott knows exactly who should marry what; whilst Ferguson
can quite explain the Post-Impressionists, but fails to understand the
Royal Academy--peculiar in a Scotchman. Yes, every single one of them
has some outstanding gift or knowledge, making him a pleasant man to
meet.

So out he goes, post-haste, to search a quality, and wishes now that he
had not spent al