Romance to the Rescue #225330

A London square. Not one of the historical squares of Mayfair, nor yet containing a sufficient percentage of professional brass plates to be identified at once as north of Oxford Street, but a good enough square for all that. Quiet and withdrawn from omnibus routes. The houses are small but neat. Where they are plaster-fronted, the paint is of recent date; where they are brick-fronted, the pointing has clearly not been neglected. For there is enough external variation in this square to give that suggestive, though often misleading clue to the character of its inhabitants, which to the speculative mind forms one of the chief attractions of a walk through the more comfortable portions of London.<br><br>Number 15, for instance, has built itself out a little bow window on the ground floor, Number 9 has attached to itself a diminutive glass porch, Number 24 has grown an extra top story. Number 18 moves with, if not in advance of the times; its dining-room curtains suggest the Ballet, and the vivid colour of its front door cannot be pleasing to Number 17, which clings to the traditions of the nineteenth century, has a bead blind in its fanlight and the only non-electric bell left in the square. Other trifling eccentricities and methods of self-expression may be noted in the remaining houses; scarcely one but has its own idea of knocker or steps or window-box.<br><br>At Number 35, however, you pause.