human
One of his neighbors erected a Flemish château, another a Florentine palazzo, and a third a François Premier _hôtel_; but his plot of ground remained an unkempt tangle of mullein and blue succory. In the end he put up a sober, handsome development on a style which the humbler passers-by often called, with approval,
gpt
but whose point of departure was Georgian. He had the instinct for that which springs out of the soil. For this reason he did not shrink from an Early Victorian note--the first note of the modern, prosperous New York--in decoration; and the same taste impelled him toward the American in art. While Neighbor Smith displayed his Gainsboroughs, and Neighbor Jones his Rousseaus or Daubignys, Conquest quietly picked up a thing here and there--always under excellent advice--which no picture-dealer had been able to dispose of, because it came from some studio in Twenty-third Street. Hung on his walls, it produced that much-sought-for effect of
human
when he was only taking his time. He had seen plainly of excellent possibilities--fine women, handsome women, clever women, good women--any of whom presumably he could have had for the asking; but none was, in his own phraseology,