"My dear," I said, and I drew her to my knee to break the news as easily as possible, "we have come to the end of our tether. As the children say when they have finished playing, we must 'bosh up.' We must make the best of a bad job, and, living in New York, do as New Yorkers do. In fact, our housekeeping must end." "Oh, Archie!" she cried, her eyes filling with tears; "do you--do you really mean it?" I bowed my head. It was inevitable. CHAPTER XX Letitia sat on an empty barrel in the carpetless drawing-room; there was desolation in her heart, chaos in mine; the tragedy of finality in the atmosphere. Strange men in linen overalls, ponderous boots, and crackly voices, creaked around, blithely disrespectful and lugubriously light-hearted. They whistled. One was named Jim; a second, Sam; a third, Joe. They had no surnames and needed none. They had come to put our poor little hollow mockery of a home into the New York receiving vault of all domestic remains known as the "storage warehouse." Sometimes they sang, as their work of devastation proceeded. They were merry souls. Occasionally they suggested the flowing bowl as an incentive to higher effort. Every day they took the corpses of homes that had succumbed to the "storage warehouse," and their sentiment was dead. Homes died so quickly in New York; their hold upon life was so frail; their assertive powers so numbed; their prospects of longevity so pitifully small! If New York furniture could think, its reflections would busy themselves with that time of passive pension and surcease from dusting, in the storage warehouse! If tables and chairs could speak, what would they not say of a fate that nipped them in their very bud and shipped them off, in arrested development, to a long vacation? Letitia sat on the empty barrel, a veritable picture of woe. Her dress was bedraggled and her hair unkempt. She had a smut on the end of her nose and it did not worry her. It was one of those smuts that it was quite impossible to overlook--large, black, and deep, intimating that it would spread, if touched. Her eyes were fixed upon Jim, and Sam, and Joe. She saw them through the dust, darkly. "Patience on a monument," could have taught my poor Letitia many useful things! "_If_ you please, mum," said Jim, pausing in a cheery rendition of _Laughing Water_ to confront Letitia; "I'll just start packing the china in that barrel, if you'll kindly get down. Sorry to disturb you, mum, but we'll try and get it done before we go to lunch." Lunch! Letitia shuddered, but she jumped from the barrel. Sympathetically, I appreciated her feelings. The word lunch sounded so dismally cruel. These men could eat horrid, stout, meat sandwiches and drink stupefying beer in the very midst of preparing us for the storage warehouse! This lunch seemed more of an outrage upon respectable sentiment than did the medical man's snack between the acts of a _post-mortem_ examination.