New York (State) -- Social life and customs -- Fiction
She walked back along the way she had come, on the sidewalk beneath the
tracks. This meandering street was called Boston Road. Kedzie had no
ideas as to the distance of Boston. She only knew that New York was good
enough for her--the New York of Forty-second Street, of course. Kedzie
did not know yet how many, many New Yorks there are in New York.
She was discouraged by her present surroundings. Along the rough and
neglected streets were little rows of shanty shops, and there were
stubby frame residences.
There was one two-story cottage snuggling against a hill; it had a
little picket fence with a little picket gate leading to a little ragged
yard with an old apple-tree in it; and there was a pair of steps up to
the front door, and a rough trellis from there to the woodshed with a
grapevine draped across it. It was of the James Whitcomb Riley school of
architecture--a house with a woodshed.
Rich people who were tired of the city, and chanced that way, used to
pause and look at that little nook and admire its meek attractiveness.
It made them homesick.
But Kedzie was sick of home. This lowly cot was too much like her
father's. It had a sign on it that said, “To Let.” It was a funny
expression. Kedzie studied it a long time before she decided that it was
New-Yorkese for “For Rent.”
She shuddered at the idea of renting or letting such a house--especially
as it was so close to a church, a small, seedy, frame church nearly all
roof, a narrow-chested, slope-shouldered churchlet with a frame cupola
for a steeple. It looked abandoned, and an ivy flourished on it so
impudently that it almost closed the unfrequented portal.
The bill-boards here made mighty interesting reading. There were
magnificent works of an art on the grand scale of a people's gallery;
one structure promulgated the glories of a notorious chewing-gum. There
was a gorgeous proclamation of a fashionable glove with a picture of
an extremely swell slim lady all dressed up--or rather all dressed
down--for the opera.
Kedzie prayed the Lord to send her some day a pair of full-length white
kid gloves like those. As for a box at the opera, she would take her
chances on the sunniest cloud-sofa in heaven for an evening at the
opera. And for a dress cut deckolett and an aigret in her hair, she
would have swapped a halo and a set of wings.
There was no end to the big pages of this literature, and Kedzie read
dozens of them from right to left in a southerly direction. Finally she
abandoned the Boston Road and walked over to a better-groomed avenue
with more of a city atmosphere.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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