As yet he had called into being only a few streets of his city, stretching eastward and southward into the green plain. About it, southward and eastward, there lay acres of naked earth upturned, torn and tamed to his hand. Beyond were the fields with their tall elms, unbroken, virgin, mournful in their last beauty, as they waited for the ax and pick. He had done terrible things to the green earth, that speculative builder, but you could not say of him that he had shut out the sky. The city ran very low upon the ground in street after street of diminutive two-storied houses. Each house was joined on to the next, porch to porch and bow window to bow window, alternating in an endless series, a machine-made pattern that repeated; a pattern monotonous and yet fantastic in its mingling of purple, white, and red. Each had the same little mat of grass laid before each bow window, the same little red-tiled path from gate to front door, the same front door decorated with elaborate paneling and panes of colored glass, the same little machine-made iron gate, the same low red wall and iron railing and privet hedge; so indistinguishably, so maddeningly alike were all these diminutive houses. Each roof had the same purple slates, each roof tree the same red earthwork edging it like a lace; the same red tiles roofed each porch and faced each gable and the space between the stories. Only when your eyes became accustomed to the endless running pattern could you trace it clearly, grasp the detail, note that every two bow windows were separated by one rain pipe, every two porches sustained by one pillar, one diminutive magnificent purple pillar, simulating porphyry and crowned with a rich Corinthian capital in freestone, the outline of each porch being picked out and made clear and decisive with woodwork painted white. Then, and not till then, did you see that the all-important detail was the porphyry pillar, for it was as if every two houses sprang from it as two flowers from one stem. Inside, each little house had the same narrow passage and steep stairs; each had the same small room at the front and one still smaller at the back; the same little scullery behind the same back door at the end of the passage that led off into the garden; and upstairs the same bathroom over the scullery, the same bedrooms back and front, and the same tiny dressing-room with its little window looking out over the porch. "Quite enough, if we can run to it," Violet said. Violet, hitherto somewhat indifferent to the adventure, was caught by the redness and whiteness, the brandnewness and compactness of the little houses; she was seduced beyond prudence by the sham porphyry pillar. "Quite enough. More than we want, really," said Ranny. But that was before they had seen the Agent and the Prospectus.