Henry James Describes My Best Friend's Apartment

Her apartments were spacious, airy, and free from precious clutter so popular in her contemporaries' lodgings, so that any assortment of gentle- men and women might come and go as they please without worrying they might upset an expensive vase or marbled umbrella-stand. 

In the early summer heat, the condition of the place had slightly altered, as the resident had been without domestic aid of any kind but a door-guard for some weeks. Here there were office-papers; there, garments of an unspeakably impolite nature; and by the window, knick-knacks whose value was that of only cheap and low sentiment.
 

The art was not grand or even beautiful, and its purpose was less to evoke feelings of reflection or revelation, and more to announce firmly a sort of upper middle class station of its owner. The selection of books, while seemingly wide at first glance, was curiously narrow upon examination, such that gentleman suitors using a pretense of borrowing a good book as a means of obtaining admission to her bedchamber often found themselves rapping their fingers nervously against the shelves, and suddenly remembering they'd taken a library loan.



Echoing through the drafty hallways and vibrating the ceiling beams were the unashamed voices of the fellow cliff-dwellers, among whom numbered a young, engaged lady financier who reprimanded her paramour for his careless method of driving an automobile in the city; and a quiet gentleman of indeterminate age and origin, given to serenading the adjacent apartments with the click-clack of his outworn boot.