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Flowers, flowers, flowers everywhere; piled high on the tables, tossed in mad confusion on the floor, and strung in long garlands to the far end of the big room. "The lady with the black hair, sitting down there by them American Beauties," said the elevator-boy, waving his hand toward the rear. I passed down a narrow path between two rows of tables that looked like blossoming hedges.

She hated holiness because she herself was sinful! It was midnight before Gila and Tennelly came forth, Tennelly grave and sad, Gila tear-stained and subdued. Courtland was sitting in the big chair before the fireplace, though the fire was smoldering low, and the elevator-boy had long ago retired to slumbers on a bench in a hidden alcove.

With a few words to the office-boy, the elevator-boy, the janitor, and additional remembrances left with the latter for the charwoman, the watchman, and several others not around, they were out in the street and Carmencita again helped in the cab. For a moment there was dazed silence, then she turned to Van Landing. "Would you mind sticking this in me?" she asked, and handed him a bent pin.

It seemed the gathering of neighborhood about Kenton, where he had felt himself so unfriended, against the outrage done him, and he felt the sweetness of being personally championed in a place where he had thought himself valued merely for the profit that was in him; his eyes filled, and his voice failed him in thanking the elevator-boy for running before him to ring the bell of his apartment.

He looked down at Alcatrante, who was close in front of him. Then his face relaxed and in spite of the gravity of his situation he smiled; for he had found a solution. Promptly he acted upon it. The car halted just below the ceiling of the first floor. "What's the matter with you?" called a voice the voice of the starter. "Man robbed," said the elevator-boy. "Bring the car down."

I do not know why the elevator-boy prefers a suit of snuff-color; but I know that he will salute us as we step out of his elevator for the last time as unfalteringly as if we had just arrived at the beginning of the summer. It is our last day in the hotel at Scheveningen, and I will try to recall in their pathetic order the events of the final week.

A deer-stalking peace drooped upon everything, and in it a man could invoke the passing of a lazy pageant of twenty years of his life. The dignity of a coffin being lowered into a grave surrounded the ultimate appearance of the lift. The expert we in America call the elevator-boy stepped from the car, took three paces forward, faced to attention and saluted.

The hour was late moving on toward midnight but in the tall black precipices of Manhattan scattered lights gleamed, in an odd, irregular pattern like the sparse punctures on the raffle-board "take a chance on a Milk-Fed Turkey" the East Indian elevator-boy presents to apartment-house tenants about Hallowe'en.

Schwirtz's acting as though he wanted to kiss her whenever he had a whisky breath, from the office-manager who came in to chat with her just when she was busiest, from the office-boy who always snapped his fingers as he went down the corridor outside her door, and from the elevator-boy who sucked his teeth. She was sorry. She wanted to climb. She didn't want to be a quitter.

I, too, was a doll as I looked up at the high white-hot mouth of a furnace and along the endless vista of mouths.... Imagine hell with the addition of electric light, and you have it!... And up-stairs, far above on the surface of the water, confectioners were making fancy cakes, and the elevator-boy was doing his work!... Yes, the inferno was the most thrilling part of the ship; and no other part of the ship could hold a candle to it.