boardinghouse

"Ruby was in hysterics when I reached their boardinghouse; she had just discovered a fearful mistake she had made in her English paper.

There is this difference between a furnished room and a boardinghouse. In a furnished room, other people do not know it when you go hungry.

It touched on chances of gigantic wealth flung before eyes that could not see, or missed by the merest accident of time and travel; and through the mad shift of things, sometimes on horseback, more often afoot, now rich, now poor, in and out, and back and forth, deck-hand, train-hand, contractor, boardinghouse keeper, journalist, engineer, drummer, real-estate agent, politician, dead-beat, rumseller, mine-owner, speculator, cattle-man, or tramp, moved Harvey Cheyne, alert and quiet, seeking his own ends, and, so he said, the glory and advancement of his country.

Long, rushing paragraphs flow along with the narrator's exasperation as he ventures from his boardinghouse in search of work and payment for translations already completed.

Essie spends most of her days working as a maid at a boardinghouse, until a wealthy black woman known as Dorcas Vashon shows up and makes her the offer of a lifetime: She will provide Essie with a classical education and a fine wardrobe, and then she will spirit her away to Washington, D.C., where Essie will meet and mingle with the upper echelons of black society.

Bina runs off to New York City and Catherine House--the very same boardinghouse for young women her mother stayed at eighteen years ago when she fled Binas father and tried (but failed) to become a famous actress.