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The Borough of Kingham was becoming suburban, though there were a few green fields left between it and the flux of London. It had the river flung across its loins like a silver girdle of chastity, and the turf and the bracken and the trees of Richmond were still near and green and inviolate. Westwards there were other notable and stately spaces, relics of regal days, refusing to be swallowed up by new little cardboard suburbs. Kingham had a market of its own, and an Assize Court, and a High Street that was crowded with people whose need was cheapness. It had a Woolworth’s Store, and obsolete trams, and incessant traffic, and two very considerable picture-houses, one of which had christened itself “The Elite.” Kingham could provide you with anything from a Morris Cowley to a penny packet of nasturtium seed, but in the matter of houses it was a little cramped.

As for the new houses, they had sprung up on one or two estates, and they had cost anything from eight hundred to two thousand pounds to build. They were sold or let to city workers or local tradesmen or elderly people who had retired. These new estates represented a middle-class community. Certainly the Borough of Kingham had a housing-scheme of its own, cottages that let at from twelve to eighteen shillings a week with the rates included, but the prospective tenants formed a long waiting list. There would be as many as ten applicants for each new cottage, and preference was given to people with children.

This problem of a house was both tantalizing and unexpected. Keir had helped to erect quite a number of houses, but he had not proposed to inhabit one. He had regarded marriage as a state that might be contemplated in the far future when his position in the social scheme should be more what he intended it to be. Marriage might be a spur, but more often it was a rope round a man’s legs. His urge had been to save money, to get his hands on the rungs and climb.

But the sacrament of marriage was being forced upon him by the gentle seductiveness of Sybil and by the enthusiasms and the ardour of Sybil. She was a creature to whom it was not easy to refuse things, and a creature whom Keir would have found it impossible to betray. He was very much in love with her, or as much in love as a self-centred young man could be. Her dark-eyed, poignant eagerness enveloped him. The locks of the young Samson were to lose some of their sanctity.

Sybil wanted a house and she wanted children. Keir was to be astonished by the eagerness with which she desired a child, and he was not attracted by children. Moreover, she assumed that he desired a house and children as ardently as she did. She saw him as a dear fellow conspirator.

“Oh, Keir, won’t it be lovely!”

She was such a warm-blooded and pretty creature that he was seduced by her domestic enthusiasms even as he had been persuaded by her poignant mouth and clinging hands. The workshop was growing facetious at his expense, though lout Scudder had been extruded from it.

“Bought a pram yet, Smithie?”

Keir was not one of those who could be easily facetious. He did not encourage confidences; he was apt to resent them, and his young, dark reticence was misunderstood. There were times when other men spoke of him as a sidey young swine. Keir had a lot to learn. A girl and a pram would teach him something.

Mrs. Lugard was being kind to Sybil. She allowed her two evenings off a week, and Keir would put on his Sunday clothes and go house-hunting with his future wife. They explored every corner of Kingham, but every niche in the borough appeared to be occupied.

Keir suggested lodgings.

“We might manage for a year and put our names down for one of the borough houses.”

Sybil looked poignant.

“Oh—Keir, not lodgings. I don’t mind how tiny the place is.”

“All right, kid.”

“Couldn’t we get a cottage built? Mr. Samson might help us.”

Keir had to repress that suggestion. You might be a good employee, but Mr. Samson was not to be antagonized by being pushed into too much altruism. Mr. Samson was not the man who believed in lifting young people over gates. Let them climb their own gate. Nor did Keir want to sink his savings in a house and be beholden to some building society at the rate of six per cent on borrowed money.

He said: “There’s the furniture. That will be as much as I can manage for the present.”

Sybil was twenty-three and she had been in service for five years, but she had not saved a sixpence, and if she had she would not have been Sybil.

It was Mr. Samson himself who directed Keir to Paragon Place. One of his bricklayers, Tom Santer, had occupied No. 3 Paragon Place, and after twenty years of thrift had bought a cottage of his own. Keir might be able to snaffle No. 3. Keir gave up half of one dinner-hour in order to go and survey Paragon Place, and when he had seen it he loathed it.

Paragon Place belonged to Victorian Kingham. It was a strand in a spider’s web of obscure and ugly little streets. It was built of yellow brick, and every cottage had the same flat, bilious face, the same two windows at the front and back. Each door was artificially grained and had a top-light of cheap blue and yellow stained glass. A brick wall, with cast-iron railings perched on it, ran the whole length of the row. There were iron gates and minute front gardens.

But the place had a kind of tired squalor. It suggested casual labour and casual ladies in caps, and when Keir found a passage and explored the hinterland of Paragon Place he discovered just what he had expected, little back gardens decorated with every sort of improvisation in the way of wireless poles and sheds, fences that were made up of old egg-boxes and bedstead frames, iron advertisement plates, and discarded galvanized sheeting. There were clothes lines, and tin baths hanging up on nails. At the back of No. 4 a fat woman was banging a frowsy doormat against a wall. Some of the gardens possessed flowers, dahlias and autumn asters, or perhaps a row of runner beans, but the general atmosphere was squalid.

Paragon Place symbolized all those mean makeshifts from which Keir was passionately determined to escape. It was not that Paragon Place was impossible merely because of its ugliness; it was impossible to Keir because it had been built by a man without vision, for people who had not been taught to see. Keir was under no illusions as to the kind of neighbours he might expect to have in Paragon Place. Thirty years ago it had been inhabited by better-class working people, but now it was a corner to which the casual and the careless tended to drift.

He did not see himself and Sybil in No. 3 next to the frowsy woman with the doormat, but he did tell Sybil that there was a house available.

“Not the place for you, kid.”

But Sybil asked him to take her to see Paragon Place, and she was far less conscious of its ugliness than he was. The tenant of No. 3 allowed them to go over the house. It had a front parlour and a kitchen and three small bedrooms, and it had been kept in good condition by Santer and his wife. They were decent, quiet, and rather old-fashioned people.

Sybil’s enthusiasm was already active in the house. Her short-sighted eyes were less restive than Keir’s and were not so aware of the nearness of all those neighbours. The Santer’s back garden was one of the few flowery and self-respecting plots in the place, and Sybil thought the view from the kitchen window quite pretty. Both the Santers were slightly deaf and, having lived for twenty years or so in Paragon Place, were inclined to be lenient towards noise.

Mrs. Santer gave them tea.

“We shouldn’t be moving, my dear, but Tom does want a bit more garden. We’ve got a bit more ground at the new place.”

Keir was reticent and guarded. He could not very well tell these good people just what he thought of the place they had lived in all these years. They were used to it. They belonged to a previous generation. But when he closed the iron gate he was aware of Sybil looking quite possessively at No. 3.

“It’s not such a bad little place, Keir. I don’t see why it shouldn’t do to begin with.”

“Like it?”

“Well, of course—it’s not like one of the new cottages, but it would be—ours, wouldn’t it?”

Ours! Yes, that was the magic word, but in those early days Keir was not fully wise to the child behind the brown eyes of Sybil. Life to her was a kind of playground, and perhaps all the toys in her particular playbox would appear wonderful. She had not the urge that obsessed him, or her urges were different. She was quite uncritical. She would stand in front of a shop-window and think the furniture was lovely, furniture that Keir suspected of being trash.

He was troubled.

“I can’t say I like the neighbourhood.”

“But where else can we go?”

She had him there; not triumphantly so, but with a kind of seductive, intimate innocence. Certainly she was not a snob, and assuredly she was easy to please. And perhaps her vivid eagerness cast a glamour over the place for Keir. In one of those little rooms he and Sybil would sleep together. Those other poignant intimacies would be made possible. He wanted Sybil, and he knew that she wanted him.

“Well, it’s going to be your house, kid. Call it the halfway house, if you like. I’ve got other ideas for the future.”

She pressed his arm. Of course he had, and so had she, but perhaps—like many a girl before her—she was moved by the lore of Eve—to make sure of her man.