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"Why," exclaimed Grady, lowering his voice as he led us through the lobby, "it's the most mysterious thing, I think, that I've ever seen!" "In what way?" prompted Kennedy. "Well," continued Grady, "it must have been just a bit after midnight that one of the elevator-boys heard what sounded like a muffled report in a room on the tenth floor.
A whole village life in the hallway of the Zodiac Building: the imperial elevator-starter in a uniform of blue and gold, and merely regal elevator-runners with less gold and more faded blue; the oldest of the elevator-boys, Harry, the Greek, who knew everybody in the building; the cigar-stand, with piles of cigarettes, cans of advertised tobacco, maple fudge wrapped in tinfoil, stamps, and even a few cigars, also the keeper thereof, an Italian with an air of swounding romance.
She sighed over the cheap jackets, with silesia linings and raveled buttonholes, which nameless copyists tried to make attractive by the clean embroidered linen collars which they themselves laundered in wash-bowls in the evening. She discovered that even after years of experience with actual office-boys and elevator-boys, Mr. Ross still saw them only as slangy, comic-paper devils.
For thanks to Parisian notions of economy even the best apartment houses dispense with elevator-boys and with lights that burn up real money every hour of the night.
These girls of the common herd were expected to call the secretaries, "Miss," no matter what street-corner impertinences they used to one another. There was no caste, though there was much factional rivalry, among the slaves beneath the stenographers, copyists, clerks, waiting-room attendants, office-boys, elevator-boys.
His ideas are perfectly impracticable, but he doesn't know that, and neither do they. He's a kind of Colonel Mulberry Sellers and a Southerner. Not the professional sort, that fight elevator-boys because they're colored, and let off rebel yells in rathskellers when a Hungarian band plays 'Dixie, but the sort you read about and so seldom see. He was once State Treasurer of Alabama."
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