In the Lower West Side of New York City, the homeless population wanders like ghosts between crumbling buildings. The owners of these buildings rent out furnished rooms to provide temporary housing. One evening, a young man rents a furnished room from a housekeeper. He asks the housekeeper if she has seen a young woman named Eloise Vashner, who left home several months ago to pursue a career in show business. The young man is in love with Eloise and has come to New York to find her. He has been searching for five months without success. To his disappointment, the housekeeper tells him she has not seen Eloise. She then brings him to his room, which is decrepit, musty, and full of moldy furniture. Various stains and marks around the room reveal hints about previous tenants who have stayed there. The young man wonders if the lack of stable housing stirs some resentment in people that causes them to take poor care of their living space.
The young man sits in his room, listening to the many sounds of the city, until the smell of mignonette (an herb used for perfume) breaks through the room’s rotting odor. The young man cries out as if the smell has spoken to him, since mignonette is Eloise’s favorite scent. He searches the room for something that might have belonged to her, but finds nothing. Grasping for hope, the young man runs to the housekeeper and asks who lived in the room before him. The housekeeper lists many people, but Eloise is not among them. The defeated young man returns to his room, where the smell of mignonette is gone. With his last hope gone, he uses the furnished room’s gas lamp to gas himself to death.
Downstairs, the housekeeper discusses the young man with her friend Mrs. McCool, revealing that Eloise had stayed in the young man’s room only last week. The housekeeper did not tell the young man because Eloise committed suicide in the furnished room, and the housekeeper worried that the news would make the young man take his business elsewhere.
