Explore "An American Tragedy" by Theodore Dreiser on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
The imaginative flights of Clyde in connection with all this--his dreams of what it might mean for him to be connected with so glorious an institution--can only be suggested. For his ideas of luxury were in the main so extreme and mistaken and gauche--mere wanderings of a repressed and unsatisfied fancy, which as yet had had nothing but imaginings to feed it.
He went back to his old duties at the drug-store--to his home after hours in order to eat and sleep--but now for the balance of this Friday and Saturday and Sunday and Monday until late in the day, he walked on air, really. His mind was not on what he was doing, and several times his superior at the drugstore had to remind him to "wake-up." And after hours, instead of going directly home, he walked north to the corner of 14th and Baltimore, where stood this great hotel, and looked at it. There, at midnight even, before each of the three principal entrances--one facing each of three streets--was a doorman in a long maroon coat with many buttons and a high-rimmed and long-visored maroon cap. And inside, behind looped and fluted French silk curtains, were the still blazing lights, the a la carte dining-room and the American grill in the basement near one corner still open. And about them were many taxis and cars. And there was music always--from somewhere.