SHORT STORY BY O’HENRY The Third Ingredient Đây là một serries truyện ngắn anh ngữ nổi tiếng với những từ vựng quen thuộc. Nhằm giúp các em và các bạn yêu thich tiếng anh luyện tập và củng cố thêm kỹ năng đọc tiếng anh | SHORT STORY BY O HENRY The Third Ingredient The so-called Vallambrosa Apartment-House is not an apartment-house. It is composed of two old-fashioned brownstone-front residences welded into one. The parlor floor of one side is gay with the wraps and head-gear of a modiste the other is lugubrious with the sophistical promises and grisly display of a painless dentist. You may have a room there for two dollars a week or you may have one for twenty dollars. Among the Vallambrosa s roomers are stenographers musicians brokers shop-girls space-rate writers art students wire-tappers and other people who lean far over the banister-rail when the door-bell rings. This treatise shall have to do with but two of the Vallambrosians-- though meaning no disrespect to the others. At six o clock one afternoon Hetty Pepper came back to her third-floor rear room in the Vallambrosa with her nose and chin more sharply pointed than usual. To be discharged from the department store where you have been working four years and with only fifteen cents in your purse does have a tendency to make your features appear more finely chiseled. And now for Hetty s thumb-nail biography while she climbs the two flights of stairs. She walked into the Biggest Store one morning four years before with seventy-five other girls applying for a job behind the waist department counter. The phalanx of wage-earners formed a bewildering scene of beauty carrying a total mass of blond hair sufficient to have justified the horseback gallops of a hundred Lady Godivas. The capable cool-eyed impersonal young bald-headed man whose task it was to engage six of the contestants was aware of a feeling of suffocation as if he were drowning in a sea of frangipanni while white clouds hand-embroidered floated about him. And then a sail hove in sight. Hetty Pepper homely of countenance with small contemptuous green eyes and chocolate-colored hair dressed in a suit of plain burlap and a common-sense hat stood before him with .
