The Vanity Girl

WEST KENSINGTON relies for romance more upon the eccentricities of individual residents than upon any variety or suggestiveness in the scenery of its streets, which indeed are mostly mere lines of uniform gray or red houses drearily elongated by constriction. Yet the suburb is too near to London for some relics of a former rusticity not to have survived; and it is refreshing for the casual observer of a city's growth to find here and there a row of old cottages, here and there a Georgian house rising from sooty flower-gardens and shadowed by rusty cedars, occasionally even an open space of building land, among the weeds of which ragged hedgerows and patches of degenerate oats still endure.