Harding of Allenwood by Harold Bindloss

The warmth of the big stove, which glowed a dull red in places, had melted holes in the frost that obscured the double windows of Davies' office, but icy draughts flowed round the room, and the temperature of the passage outside was down to zero. From where the stove-pipe pierced the wall, drops of a black distillate trickled down, and the office was filled with the smell of tar and hot iron. Rents gaped in the pine paneling, and the door had shrunk to a remarkably easy fit. The building was new, pretentious, and supposed to be centrally heated, but Winnipeg was then passing through the transition stage which occurs in the history of most Western towns: emerging from rude disorder with bold but badly guided striving toward beauty and symmetry. Civic ambition was poorly seconded by builder's skill, and the plans of aspiring architects were crudely materialized.

From where Davies sat he could look into the snowy street; the view was far from pleasing. The blackened wreck of a burnt-out store confronted the office block, and behind it straggled a row of squalid shacks. Farther on rose a wall of concrete with rusty iron framing sticking out of it; and a mound of cut stone and sawed lumber, left as it lay when the frost stopped work, encroached upon the plank sidewalk. Davies, however, was not engrossed in the view, though he had lent money upon some adjacent building lots. A survey map of the Allenwood district lay on his table, and he alternately studied it and gazed out of the window with a thoughtful air.