er understood how to hold the
confidence of people, and then the only thing left to us was a
complexion mask that the old lady had invented. It was a failure, at
first, but after I had walked my feet off introducing it, we got a bare
living from it, and I thought it would stand between me and starvation
when Welstoke had gone.

Finally that day came, too, with the undertaker creeping around in his
black, sneaking way, and I found when it was all over that she had
secretly incorporated a face-bleach company and sold all she owned to
it, complexion mask and all, and lost the whole of what she got on that
year's Derby. I've understood from the boarding-house keeper that the
last words she said, was, "Now I'm really plucked!" And that was the end
of her.

CHAPTER II

THE HOUSE ON THE RIVER

There are times like that, when one's spirit is sick, sore, and lame, as
if it was a body, and it goes looking for a place to lie down where
nobody will disturb it, and it can feel its dizzy self going into a long
sleep. I'll never forget how sick my soul was then--sick of all the
false ways and selfishness and all the old scenes, and all big cities
and the flow of faces on the streets and the memory of our elegant
apartments in Paris, with their pale brocades at the windows and on the
furniture, and sick of the sordid surroundings in the cheap New York
boarding-house where the rheumatism had finally reached Welstoke's
heart, and the paper was peeling off the walls. I had always swallowed
the airs and graces of society people very hard, and many was the time
I'd wish to drop back among people like my father's family, who didn't
mind the smell of cooking and could get a night's sleep by laying a head
on a pillow and weren't bothered by frills. So, though it was plain
enough that nothing was left for me but to come down in the world, I was
not sorry, after all. I could see in the mirror that the easy life I
had led at first, and the worry and labor of foot that had come suddenly
on top of it, had made me fat of body and yet drawn and old of face. My
youth had gone, along with Madame Welstoke, and I had little regret for
it or for her.

Business was dreadfully poor then, and for the life of me I could not
get a hold on anything in the way of hotel housekeeper, or millinery, or
doctor's office-maid. For every position that offered, which was few,
there was a mob of women w