...
* * * * *
On its long cross-town block, Mrs. Plush's boarding house repeated
itself no less than thirty-odd times. Every front hall of them smelled
like cold boiled potato, and the gilt chair in the parlor like banana.
At dinner hour thirty-odd basement dining rooms reverberated, not
uncheerfully, to the ironstone clatter of the canary-bird bathtub of
succotash, the three stewed prunes, or the redolent boiled potato, and
on Saturday mornings, almost to the thirty-odd of them, wasp-waisted,
oiled-haired young negro girls in white-cotton stockings and cut-down
high shoes enormously and rather horribly run down of heel, tilted pints
of water over steep stone stoops and scratched at the trickle with old
broom runts.
If Mrs. Plush's house broke rank at all, it did so by praiseworthy
omission. In that row of the fly-by-night and the van-by-day, the moving
or the express wagon seldom backed up before No. 28, except immediately
preceding a wedding or following a funeral.
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