On the other side, the odd-numbered side, the buildings are nearly as tall, maybe about ten feet shorter. I’ve never seen anything like them before. They are in three blocks and all the blocks are different. All they have in common is that they are all four stories high and all have flights of stone steps climbing to their front doors. The first set I passed are painted a pale cream color and have windows with rounded tops except for the big bays on the ground floor and rounded porticos held up at the ends by lions’ faces resting on sharp-clawed paws. After them comes red brick as on the opposite side, with windows set in ivory-colored stone blocks and around the middle of the houses and the edge of the roof kind of friezes in the same ivory with tops like on a castle—castellated, is it called? Max’s house is the first one in the last block (or the last if you’re going the other way), No. 19, in a row built of silvery gray bricks and red bricks in a kind of mosaic design. All the paintwork is black and cream on his house and quite new and shiny, but some of the others need painting and some need a complete cleaning.

Instead of going straight up to the front door of 19, I walked along looking at the faces. Above every front door, above the balconies that run around at this level and look like black lace, is a window made of three arched panes, the center arch being the highest, its pointed top set amid plaster garlands of flowers and leaves, and among them, in a wreath of leaves, is a different face. I mean a different face on each house, an old man with a beard and drooping mustache, a young lady with her hair looped back and a mantilla set on it, a young man like a picture I once saw of Lord Byron, another in a turban. Some have been cleaned up and repainted and look fresh and new, while others are still grimed with soot, which covers the faces like a dark veil.