As the housekeeper is taking the young man to his furnished room, the narrator uses hyperbole and imagery to capture the state of the stair carpet:
They trod noiselessly upon a stair carpet that its own loom would have forsworn. It seemed to have become vegetable; to have degenerated in that rank, sunless air to lush lichen or spreading moss that grew in patches to the staircase and was viscid under the foot like organic matter.
The first hyperbole here—“They trod noiselessly upon a stair carpet that its own loom would have forsworn”—is clearly an exaggeration. Looms are unable to forsake the textiles that people use them to create, yet O. Henry uses this language in order to help readers picture just how repulsive of an item the carpet is. His hyperbolic language continues as he describes how the carpet “seemed to have become vegetable”—again, this is a literally impossible occurrence, but it shows how decrepit and disgusting the carpet has become.
The imagery that O. Henry then uses—building off of the previous hyperbole—furthers his point that this tenement housing is in an utter state of disrepair. Not only can readers visualize the carpet as a “lush lichen or spreading moss that grew in patches to the staircase” but then can also feel the way that the carpet is “viscid” (or sticky) “under the foot like organic matter.” With all of this language, O. Henry is trying to communicate how terrible the housing options for low-income people in cities in the late-19th century were—they could either live outside on the street or inside in a place like this one, where the carpet makes it feel like they are living outside.
