"You're a wonderful girl, Clara."
They turned up the stoop of Mrs. Schulem's boarding-house, strictly
first-class. How they flourish in the city, these institutions of the
Not Yet, the Never Was, the Never Will Be, and the Has Been! They are
the half-way houses going up and the mausoleums coming down life's
incline, and he who lingers is lost to the drab destiny of this or that
third-floor-back hearthstone, hot and cold running water, all the
comforts of home. That is why, even as she moved up from the rooming to
the boarding-house and down from the third-floor back to the
second-story front, there was always under Clara Bloom's single bed the
steamer-trunk scarcely unpacked, and in her heart the fear that, after
all, this might not be transiency, but home. That is why, too, she paid
her board by the week and used printed visiting-cards.
And yet, if there exists such a paradox as an aristocracy among
boarding-houses, Mrs. Schulem's was of it. None of the boiled odors lay
on her hallways, which were not papered, but a cream-colored fresco of
better days. There was only one pair of bisques, no folding-bed, and but
the slightest touch of dried grasses in her unpartitioned front parlor.
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