As the young man is first taking a look around the furnished room he has rented, the narrator uses a simile and a metaphor:
One by one, as the characters of a cryptograph become explicit, the little signs left by the furnished room’s procession of guests developed a significance. The threadbare space in the rug in front of the dresser told that lovely women had marched in the throng. Tiny finger prints on the wall spoke of little prisoners trying to feel their way to sun and air.
The simile here—in which “the little signs left by the furnished room’s procession of guests” are compared to “the characters of a cryptograph”—communicates how intentionally the young man is inspecting the room, decoding it the way one would decode a hidden message. This is likely due to the fact that the young man has been searching for his lost love Eloise for the past five months and is looking for traces of her wherever he goes.
The metaphor here—“Tiny finger prints on the wall spoke of little prisoners trying to feel their way to sun and air”—indirectly equates the children who stayed in this room to “little prisoners” trying to escape to the outside world. That this is how the young man views children’s fingerprints says more about him than about the children—he has no way of knowing how they felt about being in this room, but he projects onto them his feeling of being trapped in these derelict conditions. Clearly, he himself feels trapped like a prisoner in this room.
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.
