ith their smirks and smiles and references in
white envelopes that they were trying to keep clean as the days went by.
Of course, I had no references at all, and small good would it do for me
to tell of my past experience. Besides, as I've often thought since, the
way I wore my hair and colored my cheeks, from the habits Welstoke had
taught me, was overdone, as all women get to overdoing the thing sooner
or later, and more particularly when they think their good looks is
threatened by the bleaching and yellowing and drying-up of the wrong
side of thirty-five. It's not a thing to help much in applying for work.
Anyway, the short of it was that after six weeks I had no job, for all
my walks in the heat to save carfare.

You have never felt the panic that comes when it seems as if Fate was
chewing away the strands of the rope that holds you to self-preservation;
it is a terrible thing and soon takes out of you all fancy notions. It
grabbed me by the neck and bent my pride and sent me off praying to
find a place through an employment agency. Cooking, washing and
ironing was good enough for me the minute I found my last dollar
staring up at me from the palm of this right hand. The fall had begun
to come on, and, believe it or not, as you like, I dreamed and dreamed
and dreamed of walking the streets at night, through the driving snow
of winter and down to the wharves and the river, with its cakes of ice
and its welcome. And when the first day I had gone to sit in the
intelligence room and a lady--she seemed like a blurred picture to me
and her questions were far away like the rumble of a train at
night--had hired me, I took my alligator bag that was left out of
the wreck of old elegance, and I stood up and tried to follow her
like a dog till she stopped me.

It was only when I'd met her later and was on the train bound for a
little town up the state, that I turned my eyes, kind of cautious, to
see who it was had hired me. You could not call her pretty, by any
means. She was tall and thin, and there was a prominent bone sticking
out at the back of her neck. Her shoulders sloped, too, and looked as if
they had been bent forward on purpose to squeeze her lungs together. Her
skin was a bit too yellow and her teeth too large and her lips too
shapeless. But the steel of people has nothing to do with the scabbard,
I'm thinking. Bodies are many a time disguises, and there was only one
place where that woman's self peeped through li