Architecturally the houses represent a declension from the purity of earlier Cambridge.  Scarcely one is really beautiful.  The style is debased.  But then, it possesses the advantage of being modernized; it has not the air of having strayed by accident into the wrong century.  And, moreover, it is saved from condemnation by its sobriety and by its honest workmanship.  It is the expression of a race incapable of looking foolish, of being giddy, of running to extremes.  It is the expression of a race that both clung to the past and reached out to the future; that knew how to make the best of both worlds; that keenly realized the value of security because it had been through insecurity.  You can see that all these houses were built by people who loved “a bit of property,” and to whom a safe and dignified roof was the final ambition achieved.  Why!  I do believe that there are men and women behind some of those curtains to this day who haven’t quite realized that the Indians aren’t coming any more, and that there is permanently enough wood in the pile, and that quinine need no longer figure in the store cupboard as a staple article of diet!  I do believe that there are minor millionaires in some of those drawing-rooms who wonder whether, out-soaring the ambition of a bit of property, they would be justified in creeping down-town and buying a cheap automobile!...  These are the people who make the link between the academic traditionalism of Cambridge and such excessively modern products of evolution as their own mayor, Mr. Shanks, protector of the poor.  They are not above forming deputations to parley with their own mayor....  I loved them.  Their drawing-rooms were full of old silver, and book-gossip, and Victorian ladies apparently transported direct from the more aristocratic parts of the Five Towns, who sat behind trays and poured out tea from the identical tea-pot that my grandmother used to keep in a green bag.

In the outer suburbs of the very largest cities I saw revulsions against the wholesale barracky conveniences of the apartment-house, in the shape of little colonies of homes, consciously but superficially imitating the Cambridge-Indianapolis tradition—­with streets far more curvily winding than the streets of Cambridge, and sidewalks of a strip of concrete between green turf-bands that recalled the original sidewalks of Indianapolis and even of the rural communities around Indianapolis.  Cozy homes, each in its own garden, with its own clothes-drier, and each different from all the rest!  Homes that the speculative builder, recking not of the artistic sobriety, had determined should be picturesque at any cost of capricious ingenuity!  And not secure homes, because, though they were occupied by their owners, their owners had not built them—­had only bought them, and would sell them as casually as they had bought.  The apartment-house will probably prove stronger than these throwbacks.  And yet the time will come when even the apartment-house will be regarded as a picturesque survival.  Into what novel architecture and organization of living it will survive I should not care to prophesy, but I am convinced that the future will be quite as interestingly human as the present is, and as the past was.