The residual June heat gathered a thin layer of glistening moisture on the sidewalk and on the meagre rectangles of grass in front of houses standing shoulder to shoulder along the way. Only Yonge Street was alive at this late hour, and he hurried across it as if the gaudy lights and the night people threatened contagion. He stopped in front of his house and surveyed the scene. The street was lined on both sides with huge silver maples. Some homes were single-family, but most were multiples, converted either to apartments or condominiums. Condominia? His own place was part of a rambling nineteenth- century agglomeration of stonework and brick with turrets and gables and gingerbread trim, a modest mansion that had been reconfigured as a jigsaw cube of modular dwellings with two-storey windows knocked through the brick and cantilevered exterior stairs of cement slab and wood. The overall effect was absolute hybrid, what he described as Victorian postmodern, and curiously pleasing.
