There was, within the space Rose's window commanded, a cheap
little tailor shop, the important part of whose business was advertised
by the sign "pressing done." There was a tobacconist's shop whose
unwashed windows revealed an array of large wooden buckets and dusty
lithographs; a shoe shop that did repairing neatly while you waited; a
rather fly-specked looking bakery. There was a saloon on the corner, and
beside it, a four-foot doorway with a painted transom over it that
announced it as the entrance of the Bellevue Hotel.
The signs on the second-story windows indicated dentist parlors, the
homes of mid-wives, ladies' tailors and dressmakers, and everywhere
furnished rooms for light housekeeping to let.
The people who patronized those shops, who drank their beer at the
corner saloon, who'd be coming hurriedly in the night to ring up the
mid-wife, who smoked the sort of tobacco that was sold from those big
wooden buckets; the people who lounged along the wide sidewalks, or came
riding down-town at seven in the morning, and back at six at night,
packed so tight that they couldn't get their arms up to hold by the
straps in the big roaring cars that kept that incessant procession going
in the middle of the street--they all inhabited, Rose realized, a world
utterly different from the one she had left.
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