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The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig; a Novel by David Graham Phillips
page 3 of 308 (00%)
de luxe quarter," to quote Mrs. Senator Mulvey, that simple, far-
Western soul, who, finding snobbishness to be the chief
distinguishing mark of the Eastern upper classes, assumed it was a
virtue, acquired it laboriously, and practiced it as openly and
proudly as a preacher does piety. Craig's chief splendor was a
sitting-room, called a parlor and bedecked in the red plush and
Nottingham that represent hotel men's probably shrewd guess at the
traveling public's notion of interior opulence. Next the sitting-
room, and with the same dreary outlook, or, rather, downlook, upon
disheveled and squalid back yards, was a dingy box of a bedroom.
Like the parlor, it was outfitted with furniture that had
degenerated upward, floor by floor, from the spacious and
luxurious first-floor suites. Between the two rooms, in dark
mustiness, lay a bathroom with suspicious-looking, wood-inclosed
plumbing; the rusted iron of the tub peered through scuffs and
seams in the age-grayed porcelain.

Arkwright glanced from the parlor where he was sitting into the
gloom of the open bathroom and back again. His cynical brown-green
eyes paused upon a scatter of clothing, half-hiding the badly-
rubbed red plush of the sofa--a mussy flannel nightshirt with
mothholes here and there; kneed trousers, uncannily reminiscent of
a rough and strenuous wearer; a smoking-jacket that, after a
youth of cheap gayety, was now a frayed and tattered wreck, like
an old tramp, whose "better days" were none too good. On the
radiator stood a pair of wrinkled shoes that had never known
trees; their soles were curved like rockers. An old pipe clamored
at his nostrils, though it was on the table near the window, the
full length of the room from him. Papers and books were strewn
about everywhere. It was difficult to believe these unkempt and
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