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 with 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.