Number Thirty-Seven Preston Lane was the last house in a row of small workmen’s cottages at the extreme western limit of the town of Blacksod. What met Wolf’s actual eyes as he clicked the little gate in the iron railings and emerged upon the road, was only a small portion of the secret causes of his happiness that June morning. He had long craved to establish himself in just such a nondescript row of unpretentious dwellings on the outskirts of a town. He had always had a feeling that the magic of simple delights came with purer impact upon the mind when unalloyed by the “artistic” or the “picturesque.” Large houses and large gardens, pretty houses and pretty gardens, seemed to intrude themselves, with all their responsibilities of possession, between his senses and the free, clear flow of unconfined, unpersonalized beauty. His feeling about the matter had something in common with the instinct that has created the monk’s cell⁠—only the cell that Wolf preferred was a lath-and-plaster workman’s villa, a place possessed of no single aesthetic quality, except perhaps that of being easily kept very neat and clean.