On Washington Boulevard, probably sixty dollars a foot removed from the
renaissance section, architecture suddenly turns an indifferent shoulder
to period, Queen Anne rubbing sloping roof with neighbor's concrete
sleeping-porch of the hygienic period. Only the building-line is
maintained, the houses sitting comfortably back and a well-hosed strip
of sidewalk, bordered in hardy maples, running clear and white out to De
Balaviere Avenue, where the _art-nouveau_ apartment-house begins to
invade. In winter bare branches meet in deadlock over this walk. On the
smooth macadamized road of Washington Boulevard automobiles try out
their speed limit.
One such wintry day, with the early dusk already invading, Mrs. Herman
Loeb, with red circles round her very black eyes, and her unrouged face
rather blotched, sat in one of the second-floor-front rooms of a double
buff-brick house on Washington Boulevard, hunched up in a red-velvet
chair, chin cupped in palm, and gazing, through perfectly adjusted
Honiton lace curtains, at the steady line of home-to-dinner motor-cars.
Warmth lay in that room, and a conservative mahogany elegance--a great
mahogany double bed, immaculately covered in white, with a large
monogram heavily hand-embroidered in its center; a mahogany swell-front
dresser, with a Honiton lace cover and a precise outlay of monogramed
silver.
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