After the young man takes note of all of the dilapidated furniture in his furnished room, the narrator notes all of the sounds and smells the young man experiences in the room, using imagery in the process:
He heard in one room a tittering and incontinent, slack laughter; in others the monologue of a scold, the rattling of dice, a lullaby, and one crying dully; above him a banjo tinkled with spirit. Doors banged somewhere; the elevated trains roared intermittently; a cat yowled miserably upon a back fence. And he breathed the breath of the house—a dank savour rather than a smell—a cold, musty effluvium as from underground vaults mingled with the reeking exhalations of linoleum and mildewed and rotten woodwork.
Here, O. Henry engages readers’ senses of hearing and smell in several different ways, helping them understand the uncomfortable and overwhelming nature of staying in tenement housing. For example, most of the sounds that the young man hears are negative in some way, such as a laugh that is “tittering and incontinent,” “the monologue of a scold,” the “rattling” of dice, doors that “banged somewhere,” trains that “roared,” and a cat that “yowled miserably.”
The smell of the room is similarly upsetting—“a dank savour rather than a smell” that the young man equates to “a cold, musty effluvium” made up of “the reeking exhalations of linoleum and mildewed and rotten woodwork.” O. Henry assumes that readers will be able to imagine the foul combination of these smells and therefore understand why the young man feels so overwhelmed and hopeless after living in places like this for five months.
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.
When capturing the decrepit state of the furnished room that the young man rents, the narrator uses a simile and imagery:
The furniture was chipped and bruised; the couch, distorted by bursting springs, seemed a horrible monster that had been slain during the stress of some grotesque convulsion. Some more potent upheaval had cloven a great slice from the marble mantel. Each plank in the floor owned its particular cant and shriek as from a separate and individual agony.
The simile here—“the couch, distorted by bursting springs, seemed a horrible monster that had been slain during the stress of some grotesque convulsion”—communicates the derelict state of the couch. Rather than simply noting the “bursting springs,” the narrator compares the couch to a violent monster, adding to the tense and unsettling mood of the story. (Though O. Henry does not use “like” or “as” here, this line is still considered a simile because the word “seemed” compares the couch to a monster rather than equating it with one.)
The imagery in this passage also helps readers understand the dilapidated state of the furnished room—they can “see” alongside the young man how “the marble mantle” had a “great slice” in it, and they can also “hear” the “particular cant and shriek” of "each plank in the floor." These various visuals and sounds—like the simile about the couch—make the room feel to readers like a battleground or a site of violence. In this way, O. Henry encourages readers to picture how unsafe these rooms feel, helping them understand why characters like Eloise and the young man might become hopeless (and ultimately end their lives) in such a setting.
