O. Henry’s writing style in “The Furnished Room” is highly descriptive, featuring metaphors, dynamic sentences, and close attention to setting. The following passage—which comes after the young man smells a scent he associates with Eloise—captures some of these stylistic elements:
And then he traversed the room like a hound on the scent, skimming the walls, considering the corners of the bulging matting on his hands and knees, rummaging mantel and tables, the curtains and hangings, the drunken cabinet in the corner, for a visible sign, unable to perceive that she was there beside, around, against, within, above him, clinging to him, wooing him, calling him so poignantly through the finer senses that even his grosser ones became cognisant of the call.
This passage—a single complex sentence—shows off O. Henry’s animated writing style. The sentence’s many clauses (broken up by commas) communicates the young man’s urgent desperation to find “a visible sign” that Eloise was once in the furnished room where he is now staying and, at the same time, shows Eloise’s ghostly desperation to be “beside, around, against, within, above” the young man.
At the same time that this sentence furthers the plot, it also helps readers visualize the furnished room better—they can see “the bulging matting,” the “rummaging mantel and tables,” “the curtains and hangings,” and “the drunken cabinet in the corner.” All of these descriptions help readers unfamiliar with furnished tenement rooms to get a sense of the setting. The simile at the start of the passage—“he traversed the room like a hound on the scent”—also brings readers even closer into the scene as they visualize the young man's desperate searching.
It is notable that O. Henry includes such detailed descriptions of the setting while mostly failing to describe any of the characters’ appearances. This is his way of signaling that the characters could be anyone—the point he is making is that the young man and housekeeper are just placeholders for tenants and landlords more broadly. That these two main characters remain nameless also furthers this point.
