In order to portray the characters, to describe the setting and to render the general mood and atmosphere of the passage vividly and convincingly the author of the analysed passage resorts to the following devices:

-                     Lexical:

+  metaphor: pay something on his rent; honk loudly; to seize a chance;

+   personification: the winters that had the double front room with private bath; through the glass of the little skylight you saw a square of blue infinity; with her demon's smile at his pale looks;

+   irony: "In this closet," she said, "one could keep a skeleton or anaesthetic or coal”; "Eight dollars?" said Miss Leeson. "Dear me! I'm not Hetty if I do look green.”; Mr. Skidder jumped and strewed the floor with cigarette stubs at the rap on his door.; "Excuse me, Mr. Skidder," said Mrs. Parker, with her demon's smile at his pale looks. "I didn't know you were in. I asked the lady to have a look at your lambrequins.";

+   epithets: incredulous, pitying, sneering, icy stare;

+   oxymoron: roguish heroine; heavy hair; vivacious features;

+   simile: in a cloud of smoke like an aerial cuttlefish;

+   hyperbole: his fatness hovered above her like an avalanche.

-                     Phonetic:

+   alliteration: smoked cigarettes; still stood; Clara would say; way to the second floor back; forty-five, fat, flush and foolish

-                     Syntactical:

+   polysyndeton: She was a very little girl, with eyes and hair that had kept on growing after she had stopped and that always looked as if…; …black-haired heroine from his latest (unproduced) play and inserting a small, roguish one with heavy, bright hair and vivacious features…; … thrust her into a vault with a glimmer of light in its top and muttered the menacing and cabalistic words…; And Miss Dorn, who shot at the moving ducks at Coney every Sunday and worked in a department store, sat on the bottom step and sniffed.

+   assonance: feeling, half- Tuskegeenial, sneering, Leeson, sleeves;

+   repetition: Avaunt, Hoover! Hoover, forty-five, flush and foolish, might carry off Helen herself; Hoover, forty-five, flush, foolish and fat is meat for perdition.

-                     Graphic and phonetic:

+   graphon: Then--oh, then—if