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Outside the railings the hollow square of crumbling houses, shells of a bygone gentry, leaned as if in ghostly gossip over the forgotten doings of the vanished quality. Sic transit gloria urbis. A block or two north of the Park, Dawe steered the editor again eastward, then, after covering a short distance, into a lofty but narrow flathouse burdened with a floridly over-decorated facade.
From Six Mile Point, Flathouse, Nine Mile Stone follow the footpeople with knotty sticks, hayforks, salmongaffs, lassos, flockmasters with stockwhips, bearbaiters with tomtoms, toreadors with bullswords, greynegroes waving torches. The crowd bawls of dicers, crown and anchor players, thimbleriggers, broadsmen. THE CROWD: Card of the races. Racing card! Ten to one the field! Tommy on the clay here!
It was a new flathouse, bearing carved upon its cheap stone portal its sonorous name, "The Vallambrosa." Fire-escapes zigzagged down its front these laden with household goods, drying clothes, and squalling children evicted by the midsummer heat. Here and there a pale rubber plant peeped from the miscellaneous mass, as if wondering to what kingdom it belonged vegetable, animal or artificial.
"Why, how comfy you are here, aren't you?" says Vee, gazin' around. "Ye-e-es, aren't we?" says Lucy Lee, a bit draggy. If you've ever made one of these flathouse first calls you can fill in the rest for yourself.
"Say, lookyhere, Abe," he yelled, "ask me no questions. I am sick and tired of it. You would think if a feller forgets to buy a packet soap powder, y'understand, his wife wouldn't go crazy and ring up the police station yet, on account I am going with Baskof and this here cutter to see a lawyer by the name Sholy, which he lives in my flathouse yet.
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