The Coast of Bohemia by William Dean Howells

When she got home from the Synthesis the first Saturday afternoon, Cornelia climbed up the four flights of stairs that led to her little room, and lay down to rest, as she promised Mrs. Burton she would do every day; some days she did not. She had to lie on her bed, which filled two-thirds of the room. There was a bureau with a glass, which she could not see the bottom of her skirt in without jumping up; and a wash-stand with a shut-down lid, where she wrote her letters and drew; a chair stood between that and her trunk, which was next the door, and let the door open part way.

It seemed very cramped at first, but she soon got used to it, and then she did not think about it; but accepted it as she did everything else in the life that was all so strange to her. She had never been in a boarding-house before, and she did not know whether it was New York usage or not, that her trunk, which the expressman had managed to leave in the lower hall, should be left standing there for twenty-four hours after his escape, and that then she should be asked to take some things out of it so that it should not be too heavy for the serving-maids to carry up to her room. There was no man-servant in the place; but the landlady said that they expected to have a furnace-man as soon as it came cold weather.