«Behind the Venetian blinds of a respectable middle-class, fifty-pound-a-year, «semi-detached,» «family» house, in a respectable middle-class road of the little north-county town of Sidon, midway between the trees of wealth upon the hill, and the business quarters that ended in squalor on the bank of the broad and busy river, – a house boasting a few shabby trees of its own, in its damp little rockeried slips of front and back gardens, – on a May evening some ten or twelve years ago, a momentous crisis of contrasts had been reached.»
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