Page:Harvey O'Higgins--Silent Sam and other stories.djvu/189

Rh had wakened to the day's work, he was driving up and down the cross streets of the East Side, reading notices of flats to let. The janitors were putting out their ash-cans. He hailed them from his high seat with "How much 're yer rooms?" Then, with the price in his eye, he "sized up" the front of the building, shook his head, and drove on.

He wanted something new; no "second-hand" flats for him. He did not intend to pay more than fifteen dollars a month rent; and he did not wish more than four or five rooms.

It was eight o'clock before he came on the row of apartment houses that are known to the neighborhood of Second Avenue and Twelfth Street as "The Honeymoon Flats" but it did not take him ten minutes to decide that he had found his home. The last of the buildings had just been opened for occupancy; it was in red brick striped with white-stone facings; there was a shining brass hand-rail down the front steps; the halls were gay with crimson burlaps; and on the fifth floor there was a flat of five rooms, papered in gorgeous designs of red, green, and gold, to rent for twenty dollars a month.

The fact that the houses were called "The Honeymoon Flats" because none but inexperienced housekeepers would try to live in them, was not known to Carney. They were unheated, except by gas-grates; but he was not one to think of heating arrangements in midsummer, and the grates were bronzed and glittering. There were cracks around the window frames large enough to put a