The house stood in a commanding position above an up-town avenue. It was painted white with green trimmings, and had a front portico of tall Doric columns reaching up to the top of the house. People habitually referred to its style of architecture as "Colonial." "Post-Colonial," or "late American Georgian" would have come much nearer the mark, but these distinctions are as naught to the great and glorious body of New England's inhabitants, to whom everything with pillars is and always will be "Colonial." The house was in truth a fine example of its style, and had been surprisingly little spoiled by the generations of Wimbournes that had lived and died in it, but the unity of its general effect was marred by the addition of two wings reaching out from its sides, erected by Hilary Wimbourne's father in the fifties and showing all the peculiarities of that glorious but architecturally weak period. Friends of the family often expressed sympathy and sorrow at the anachronism the house was thus made to offer, but Hilary soon became somewhat impatient of these. In fact, he never listened to an expression of regret on the subject without breathing a silent prayer of thanksgiving that the wings had been built when they were, and not ten or twenty or thirty years later, when architectural indiscretion ran to extremes only vaguely hinted at in the forties and fifties.
"Besides," he would explain to those who showed interest in the matter, "those wings are not always going to look as badly as they do now. Our eyes will always look on them as unpleasantly different from the old house, but the eyes of a hundred years hence will see in them nothing more than a quaint and agreeable variety. After all, the two styles are but two different aspects of neo-classicism, one a little more remote from its original model than the other. History has proved what I say; think how the sensitive must have shuddered in the fifteenth century when they saw a lot of Perpendicular Gothic slammed down by the side of pure Early English! It must have looked like the very devil to them." Only very few people heard this theory carried back to its logical conclusion, however. Hilary would see and recognize the drowning expression that came over their faces, and as soon as he knew that he was beyond their depth he stopped, for he made it a rule never to talk above people's heads. Consequently he seldom got beyond the "neo-classicism" point.