The
Wyandotte had gone up before landlords grasped the obvious truth
that in a fire-proof structure locations farthest from noise and
dust should and could command highest prices; so Joshua Craig's
flat was the cheapest in the house. The ninety dollars a month
loomed large in his eyes, focused to little-town ideas of values;
it was, in fact, small for shelter in "the de luxe district of the
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.
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