On returning to New York I learned that Mrs. Tompkins had ordered Alice home; the hat-trimming season being over, Mrs. Wilkins was preparing to resume her duties in the linen-room of the Coney Island hotel; and the little organist had already gone to Maine to spend the summer with her mother and sisters. The restaurant-keeper, having been mysteriously robbed of all his trousers excepting the pair he was wearing, declared to me his intention to “get out.” The reporter was shortly to take up his suit-case and walk, and the gentleman of many shoes and walking-sticks greeted me with the information that he had purchased a water-front estate on the Sound. It would seem that I should have been eagerly preparing to write the story of Polly Preston. Certainly I would never be able to incorporate in one novel all the material I had already accumulated. Yet I never was farther from wishing to begin a book. It may have been the general unrest caused by the war. Even now I can give no explanation for my mental condition at that time. So, instead of returning to my own field, I set out the following morning to get a new job. Having secured all previous positions through the help-wanted columns of the newspapers, I now determined to try employment agencies. My plan was to register at an agency making a specialty of supplying domestic servants, pay the required fee, and leave my three letters of recommendation. These three letters! One, as stated, was given me by the housekeeper of Sutton House. The other two I had used getting in at Sea Foam—one written by Alice from her Washington City address, the other written by myself in my own proper person. In it I had stated that Emily Porter had been for twenty years in the service of my mother, and since my mother’s death she had been in my employ. After the writers of these letters were communicated with I expected, in course of time, to get the refusal of a position in a private family—as waitress, second girl, or chambermaid. That was as I expected the matter to develop. What happened? Within five minutes after I entered the agency, before I had paid my fee or handed in my letters, two women were bidding for my services. Both were expensively gowned, both lived in a quasi-fashionable suburb of New York, and both wished me to come to her at once as second maid, the difference between the two being that one had children and the other dogs. I elected the one with children. Instead of her waiting and investigating my references she insisted on my accompanying her back home, giving me three hours to meet her at the railroad-station. When I saw her house I understood her hurry. Chaos! Dirty chaos at that. The cook, Irish, of course, told me that five maids had come and gone during the two previous weeks.