house individual and different from all the rest. Few of the houses are
large; on the other hand, none of them is small: this is the region of
the solid middle class, the class which loves comfort and piques itself
on its amenities, but is a little ashamed or too timid to be luxurious.

Architecturally the houses represent a declension from the purity of
earlier Cambridge. Scarcely one is really beautiful. The style is
debased. But then, it possesses the advantage of being modernized; it
has not the air of having strayed by accident into the wrong century.
And, moreover, it is saved from condemnation by its sobriety and by its
honest workmanship. It is the expression of a race incapable of looking
foolish, of being giddy, of running to extremes. It is the expression of
a race that both clung to the past and reached out to the future; that
knew how to make the best of both worlds; that keenly realized the value
of security because it had been through insecurity. You can see that all
these houses were built by people who loved "a bit of property," and to
whom a safe and dignified roof was the final ambition achieved. Why! I
do believe that there are men and women behind some of those curtains to
this day who haven't quite realized that the Indians aren't coming any
more, and that there is permanently enough wood in the pile, and that
quinine need no longer figure in the store cupboard as a staple article
of diet! I do believe that there are minor millionaires in some of those
drawing-rooms who wonder whether, out-soaring the ambition of a bit of
property, they would be justified in creeping down-town and buying a
cheap automobile!... These are the people who make the link between the
academic traditionalism of Cambridge and such excessively modern
products of evolution as their own mayor, Mr. Shanks, protector of the
poor. They are not above forming deputations to parley with their own
mayor.... I loved them. Their drawing-rooms were full of old silver, and
book-gossip, and Victorian ladies apparently transported direct from the