'Most cities,' a man said, suddenly, 'lay out their roads at right
angles. We do in the business quarters. What d'you think?'
'I fancy some of those big cities will have to spend millions on curved
roads some day for the sake of a change,' I said. 'You've got what no
money can buy.'
'That's what the men tell us who come to live in Victoria. And they've
had experience.'
It is pleasant to think of the Western millionaire, hot from some
gridiron of rectangular civilisation, confirming good Victorians in the
policy of changing vistas and restful curves.
There is a view, when the morning mists peel off the harbour where the
steamers tie up, or the Houses of Parliament on one hand, and a huge
hotel on the other, which as an example of cunningly-fitted-in
water-fronts and facades is worth a very long journey. The hotel was
just being finished. The ladies' drawing-room, perhaps a hundred feet by
forty, carried an arched and superbly enriched plaster ceiling of knops
and arabesques and interlacings, which somehow seemed familiar.
'We saw a photo of it in Country Life,' the contractor explained. 'It
seemed just what the room needed, so one of our plasterers, a
Frenchman - that's him - took and copied it.
