It was now five o'clock and a little cooler, yet William Hollis walked very slowly. There was a lot of time to kill before the day was through. But his thoughts were biting him harder than ever as he turned into the famous road leading to the city, known as The Rise. This salubrious eminence, commanding the town from the northeast, was sacred to the city magnates. When a man made good in Blackhampton, really good, he built a house on The Rise. It was the ambition of every true Blackhamptonian to express his individuality in that way. Until he had achieved a house entirely to his own fancy and taste on The Rise, no son of Blackhampton could be said really to have "arrived."
William Hollis trudged slowly along a well kept road, between two irregular lines of superb villas, gleaming with paint and glass, standing well back from the road in ample grounds of their own, with broad and trim gravel approaches. The first on the right was Rosemere, the residence of Sir Reuben Jope, three times Mayor of Blackhampton, a man of large fortune and robust taste, whose last expression was greenhouses and conservatories. They were said to produce fabulous things--flowers, fruits, shrubs, plants known only to tropical countries. Many a time from afar had Bill gazed upon them with rather wistful awe.
A little farther along was The Haven, the ancestral home of the Clints, a famous Blackhampton family whose local prestige was on a par with that of the Rothschilds in the city of London. Across the road was The Gables, the modest house of Lawyer Mossop, the town's leading solicitor; then on the right, again, the reticulated dwelling of the philanthropic Stephen Mortimore, head of the great engineering firm of Mortimore, Barrow, and Mortimore. For a true son of Blackhampton these were names to conjure with. Even to walk along such a road gave one a feeling of worldly success, financial security, aristocratic exclusiveness.
Still a little further along on the left was what was clearly intended to be the _pièce de resistance_ of The Rise. It was the brand-new residence of the very latest arrival and no house had been more discussed by Blackhampton society. It was intended to eclipse every other dwelling on The Rise, but it was of nondescript design, half suburban villa, half mediæval castle. From the æsthetic standpoint the result was so little satisfactory that a local wit had christened it "Dammit 'All."