The Reproachless Apartment
“Fifth and Sixth Avenues, it seemed to Anthony, were the uprights of a gigantic ladder stretching from Washington Square to Central Park. Coming up-town on top of a bus toward Fifty-second Street inevitably gave him the sensation of hoisting himself hand by hand on a series of treacherous rungs, and when the bus jolted to a stop at his own rung he found something akin to relief as he descended the reckless metal steps to the sidewalk.
After that, he had but to walk down Fifty-second Street half a block, pass a stodgy family of brownstone houses–and then in a jiffy he was under the ceiling of his great front room. This was entirely satisfactory. Here, after all, life began. Here, he slept, breakfasted, read, and entertained.
