Cass Timberlane, A Novel of Husbands and Wives by Sinclair Lewis

The boarding-house of Miss Tilda Hatter was the hobohemia of Grand Republic. It occupied the two upper floors of a senile brick building near Paul Bunyan Avenue, in a land of railroad sidings and six-man factories. On the ground floor of the building was the Lilac Lady Lunchroom: T. Hatter, Prop., at whose counter and four tousled tables eternal and poetic Youth could drink coffee and eat blueberry pie a la mode, with ice cream disgustingly but sweetly melting down into the blue-smeared debris, and talk about the high probability of their going to Minneapolis and singing on the radio, or going to Chicago and studying interior decorating.

Above the restaurant were a dozen bedrooms, with one bath, and a living-room agreeably littered with skis, skates, unstrung tennis rackets, stenographers' note-books, manuals on air-conditioning and gas-engine construction, burnt-out portable radio sets, empty powder compacts, empty gin bottles, and the Poetic Works of John Donne, with the covers missing. These upper rooms were reached by a covered wooden outside staircase.