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Updated: September 21, 2025
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 length she found herself on the ferry-boat, in the soothing stuffiness of the crowded cabin; then came another interval of shivering on a street-corner, another long jolting journey in a "cross-town" car that smelt of damp straw and tobacco; and lastly, in the cold spring dusk, she unlocked her door and groped her way through the shop to her fireless bedroom. The next morning Mrs.
Alighting in front of the Brevoort, he slunk rather than sauntered up the Avenue until he came to the cross-town street in which she lived,—in which he once had lived. It was a fair night for such an adventure as this. There were but few people abroad. The rain was falling steadily and there was a gusty wind.
In the cross-town streets the steps of the old brownstone houses were swarming with "stoopers," that motley race hailing from sky-light room and basement, bringing out their straw door-step mats to sit and fill the air with strange noises and opinions. North and I dined on the top of a hotel; and here, for a few minutes, I thought I had made a score.
"But one feels differently, you know, about taking chances where a nice girl like Betty is concerned. Let me see; it's still early. Do you feel up to taking that long-deferred ride on a trolley-car? Good! We'll take the cross-town over to Eighth Avenue and get into the heart of it at once." "That's an unlucky number," said Indiman, as we boarded a car.
"Oh, I know well enough what I ought to do. I ought to answer some advertisement for a typist I can do that, but not stenography and take a regular job. The sort you said you'd shoot Mr. Whitney for offering you. And then I ought to take a hall bedroom somewhere in the cross-town twenties and live on what I earned. That's the only thing I can see, and, Rush, I simply haven't the courage to do it.
He saw again all the incidents of the long run, not omitting the delay caused by hose-carts and a hook-and-ladder running to a cross-town fire, during which time he and Clancey had joked Jaffers over the dates with various fictitious damsels out of which he had been cheated by the night's extra work.
Outside, the flakes had ceased and the sinister-looking side street lay in a white hush, a single line of scraggly footsteps crunched into the snow of the sidewalk. A clock from a sky-scraping tower rang out eight, its echoes singing like anvils in the sharp, thin air. On the cross-town street the shops were full of light and activity, crowds wedging in and out.
A few minutes later they transferred to a cross-town line without misadventure. "They certainly make you step lively in this town," panted Tom, clutching a strap and narrowly avoiding a seat in the lap of a very stout lady. "Glad I don't have to live here!"
"When we get back this evening," Dolly explained, "that will be the first thing we'll see. It's going to look awfully good!" This day there was no scarlet car to rush them with refreshing swiftness through Brooklyn's parkways and along the Ocean Avenue. Instead, they hung to a strap in a cross-town car, changed to the ferry, and again to the Long Island Railroad.
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