The Mystery of Murray Davenport A Story of New York at the Present Day

Excerpt

The night set in with heavy and unceasing rain, and, though the month was August, winter itself could not have made the streets less inviting than they looked to Thomas Larcher.  Having dined at the caterer’s in the basement, and got the damp of the afternoon removed from his clothes and dried out of his skin, he stood at his window and gazed down at the reflections of the lights on the watery asphalt.  The few people he saw were hastening laboriously under umbrellas which guided torrents down their backs and left their legs and feet open to the pour.  Clean and dry in his dressing-gown and slippers, Mr. Larcher turned toward his easy chair and oaken bookcase, and thanked his stars that no engagement called him forth.  On such a night there was indeed no place like home, limited though home was to a second-story “bed sitting-room” in a house of “furnished rooms to let” on a crosstown street traversing the part of New York dominated by the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel.