He waved his hand in the direction of the house and was silent.
severe, imposing, almost menacing, Crome loomed down on them.

"The great thing about Crome," said Mr. Scogan, seizing the
opportunity to speak, "is the fact that it's so unmistakably and
aggressively a work of art. It makes no compromise with nature,
but affronts it and rebels against it. It has no likeness to
Shelley's tower, in the 'Epipsychidion,' which, if I remember
rightly--

"'Seems not now a work of human art,
But as it were titanic, in the heart
Of earth having assumed its form and grown
Out of the mountain, from the living stone,
Lifting itself in caverns light and high.'

No, no, there isn't any nonsense of that sort about Crome. That
the hovels of the peasantry should look as though they had grown
out of the earth, to which their inmates are attached, is right,
no doubt, and suitable. But the house of an intelligent,
civilised, and sophisticated man should never seem to have
sprouted from the clods. It should rather be an expression of
his grand unnatural remoteness from the cloddish life. Since the
days of William Morris that's a fact which we in England have
been unable to comprehend. Civilised and sophisticated men have
solemnly played at being peasants. Hence quaintness, arts and
crafts, cottage architecture, and all the rest of it. In the
suburbs of our cities you may see, reduplicated in endless rows,
studiedly quaint imitations and adaptations of the village hovel.