Riceyman Square had been built round St. Andrew's in the hungry 'forties. It had been built all at once, according to plan; it had form. The three-story houses (with areas and basements) were all alike, and were grouped together in sections by triangular pediments with ornamentations thereon in a degenerate Regency style. These pediments and the window-facings, and the whole walls up to the beginning of the first floor were stuccoed and painted. In many places the paint was peeling off and the stucco crumbling. The fronts of the doorsteps were green with vegetable growth. Some of the front-doors and window-frames could not have been painted for fifteen or twenty years. All the horizontal lines in the architecture had become curved. Long cracks showed in the brickwork where two dwellings met. The fanlights and some of the iron work feebly recalled the traditions of the eighteenth century. The areas, except one or two, were obscene. The Square had once been genteel; it ought now to have been picturesque, but was not. It was merely decrepit, foul and slatternly. It had no attractiveness of any sort. Evolution had swirled round it, missed it, and left it. Neither electricity nor telephones had ever invaded it, and scores of windows still had Venetian blinds. All men except its inhabitants and the tax-collector, the rate-collector, and the school attendance officer had forgotten Riceyman Square.
It lay now frowsily supine in a needed Sunday indolence after the week's hard labour. All the upper windows were shut and curtained, and most of the ground-floor windows. The rare glimpses of forlorn interiors were desolating. Not a child played in the roadways. But here and there a housewife had hung her doormats and canaries on the railings to take the holy Sabbath air; and newspapers, fresh as newly gathered fruit, waited folded on doorsteps for students of crime and passion to awake from their beds in darkened and stifling rooms. Also little milk-cans with tarnished brass handles had been suspended in clusters on the railings. Cats only, in their elegance and their detached disdain, rose superior to the terrific environment. The determined church bells ceaselessly jangled.
"The church is rather nice," said Mrs. Arb. "But what did I tell you about the Square?"
"Wait a moment! Wait a moment," replied Mr. Earlforward. "Let us walk round, shall we?"
They began to walk round. Presently Mr. Earlforward stopped in front of a house which had just been painted, to remind the spectator of the original gentility of the hungry 'forties.
"No broken panes there, I think," he remarked triumphantly.
Mrs. Arb's glance searched the façade for even a cracked pane, and found none. She owed him a shilling.
"Well," she said, somewhat dashed, but still briskly. "Of course there was bound to be one house that was all right. Don't they say it's the exception proves the rule?"
He understood that he would not receive his shilling, and he admired her the more for her genial feminine unscrupulousness.
At the corner of Gilbert Street Mrs. Arb suddenly burst out laughing.