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.

Letitia was dry-eyed until they took up the tiger-head, over which we had fallen at so many merry, unexpected moments, and began to fold it up. Then she burst into tears and ran into the dining-room, where I followed her, slowly, and mournfully.

"Don't, Letitia," I said, feeling ridiculously oppressed. "Why should we mind? New Yorkers don't think anything of all this. They rather like it. They look upon it as emancipation from care and worry. Don't cry, my girl. See, let me wipe that smut from your nose."

"No, you s-shan't," she sobbed, warding me off. "If I ch-choose to be s-smutty, I—I w-will be s-smutty."

I sat down and beat a nervous tattoo on the last table that had the last cloth upon it. The last cruet, containing the last vinegar, and the last mustard stood on this last table that had the last cloth upon it. I allowed Letitia to have her cry out. When she had finished and had dried her eyes, the smut had expanded to such an extent that portions of it were smeared upon her cheeks, chin, and lips. Under the circumstances, there was bathos amid the poor girl's pathos!

"I can't realize it, Archie," she said funereally, when her equanimity was restored. "I can't grasp the fact that this is really the end, and that to-night—to-night, my poor boy—we shall be lodged in a family hotel, so-called, I suppose, because none of the guests have families and the proprietor wouldn't take them in if they had!"

"I dare say, dear, we shall be very comfortable."

"Parlor and bedroom elegantly furnished; bath; generous cuisine; fine music; view of Central Park and Hudson River! I have learned it all by heart. Nothing of it belongs to us, Archie. It is the sort of thing one looks at for two weeks in Paris, or Rome, or Berlin, but to regard it as permanent is too dreadful. And the starchy, artificial women strutting into the dining-room, wearing all the clothes they can get on to their backs, with their cheerless husbands in tow, eating the dinners that they haven't ordered and grumbling about them; then, trotting away from the dining-room, back to their silent rooms, there to wait until it is bedtime."

"You can't possibly know, Letitia," I said, "as you've never lived in one of these places. You are morbid, and a bit unreasonable."

"Oh, I've met people who have lived in them," she retorted, "and who have liked it. They had nothing to worry about and nothing even to think about—except how to kill time. A friend of Mrs. Archer's told me that the favorite topic of conversation was the food. Was the meat of the best quality? Were the vegetables fresh or canned? Was the table as bountiful this season as last? Most of the people, it seems, grow tired of the food and go to other restaurants in despair."

She paused, racking her brain for more torments and apparently taking a keen pleasure in torturing herself. Yet we both knew that it was inevitable. We had discussed the matter into shreds and argued it into tatters. Still, there was a sort of luxury in this grief.

"I can see myself a year hence," she went on contemptuously, "going to flashy restaurants with you, and—perhaps, Archie, stealing spoons and forks, and bringing them home—I say 'home' but I mean 'family hotel'—as souvenirs. Mrs. Archer told me that all these women do that. I think it loathsome and detestable, now, but I dare say that I shall be exactly like the other women, as I am going to live in exactly the same way, for exactly the same reason."

"You will never descend to that, my girl," I said solemnly.

"How do you know?" she asked perversely. "I dare say we shall be so frantic for something to do that we shall look upon this kind of petty theft as sport—just as some people regard fishing. Of course, we shall. I imagine I shall feel proud of myself if I have successfully sneaked a sugar-bowl, and I can picture your joy at landing a silver soup-tureen! Oh, it will be exciting. We shall come to it; see if we don't."

"Please—please don't talk in that way, Letitia. Yesterday you were quite resigned and even happy. I can't bear to see you in this mood. We both agreed that the family hotel was the only hope. We were driven to it—absolutely impelled to it. I think it is the packing that is upsetting you."

"Sorry to trouble you," said Joe, poking his head in at the door; "we've finished the parlor, and are now going to start on this room. We've left two chairs in the parlor for you to sit on. Sorry to trouble you."

Poor Letitia gave way again, as she saw our little "drawing-room" completely denuded. Nothing was left. Gone were the pictures, the ornaments, the tiger-head, the Indian cabinet, the what-nots and shelves, the footstools and plants. Barrels, crates, bits of wood, nails, old newspapers, straw, littered the room. It was the abomination of desolation.

Letitia sat and wept on one chair. I took the other and closed my eyes in rueful meditation. Before my mental vision a procession of our destroyers passed mockingly. I saw Anna Carter, Mrs. Potzenheimer, Birdie Miriam McCaffrey, Gerda Lyberg, Olga Allallami, Madame Hyacinthe de Lyrolle, Leonie, Katie Smith, Rachel, and—could I ever forget that wistful, winsome face?—Priscilla Perfoozle. They seemed to glare at me revengefully, as though their aims had been accomplished, and their fell projects crowned with success. Then they formed a ring around me and danced in fiendish abandon. Each appeared to wear a badge on the left side of her bodice, just over the heart, and I could read the legend, "Death to the Home." The sight was ghastly. They grinned from ear to ear, in precisely the same way, and I was surprised to notice that their black dresses, heavily trimmed with crape, were precisely alike, as though they were all members of some devilish sisterhood. I believe I tried to open my eyes; my heart was beating wildly; I could feel the perspiration streaming from my face; I heard myself groan.

"Archie!" cried Letitia, at my side. "What is the matter? My poor boy, you have been asleep, and you must have been dreaming—at this time of day, too! Oh, you poor thing, you feel it all even more than I do. How selfish I am, after all—thinking only of myself. It is wicked of me and ungrateful. After all, what does anything really matter, as long as we have each other—you and I—and our health and our strength, and"—with a smile—"the price."

Her words fell sweetly upon my ear. It was good to know that I had been nightmaring in the daytime, and that the fiendish sisterhood was intangible.

"Cheer up, Archie," she went on, "we were both silly, gloomy things, and there is no reason why we should feel so oppressed, is there? As you say, it is this packing that has upset us. Packing is a horrid institution, anyway, even when one is going away for pleasure. I always feel sorry to leave any place, even if I hate it; don't you, Archie? I guess that we are both alike, and that we weren't built for such an unsentimental place as New York City."

"We've nearly finished the dining-room," said Sam, looking in upon us suddenly, "and we'd like to bring a few of the things in here, if you wouldn't mind stepping into the bedroom! Sorry to trouble you, mum!"

In a less remorseful frame of mind, we were driven to our little bedroom, as yet untouched. Letitia made a brave effort to remain calm. I could see that she was biting her lip, and I appreciated her determination so thoroughly that I made up my mind to do all I could to steer clear of further pathos. We sat on the bed.

"I read this morning, Letitia," I said hurriedly, "that a bill has been introduced into the Assembly for the protection of homes from the unfit servants that are supplied by intelligence offices. It is asserted that women who should not be permitted to come in contact with the family circle are sent out. Strong arguments were made, and—"

Letitia smiled in spite of herself. "It is amusing," she said. "Why bother about abolishing bad servants when there are no others? It is wonderful how people can interest themselves in that side of the case, when it is the other that is responsible for all our troubles. However, I suppose they need their little pastimes, even in Albany, and the uninitiated might think, when they read about it, that a bill to abolish bad servants would help you to get good ones, which is, of course, idiotic, as there are none."

"Of course you are right, dear," I said, glad to see that I had roused her.

"Anyway," she continued, "most people don't want homes and have forgotten what they are like, so that there is no need to feel too regretful. Unfortunately, the real nuisance is that when we're old and have grandchildren, we shall never be able to treat them in the good old way. Grandpa and grandma will be in furnished rooms and the old homestead will exist no more! Perhaps, after all, the home is just a relic of barbarism. Even grandchildren, however, are going out of fashion. New York women are too young to have them, and they have lost the art of growing old. Fancy a New York grandmother in a cap, knitting, with her grandchildren at her knee! No, Archie. She prefers yellow hair, a blush (supplied from a nineteen-cent box) upon her cheek, and a pneumatic figure pumped up around her poor old bones, to the ancient poetic notion."

"It is the spirit of progress."

"Yes, dear, it must be. Grandma is a giddy young thing and not a bit disturbed when grandpa is gathered unto his fathers. When that happens, she very often marries a pretty little college lad, who was in long dresses when her first grandchild was born. And she takes him to live with her in the family hotel and provides for him generously. And when she really can't live any longer—she would if she could—she dies and leaves him her cash. Dear strenuous young-old thing! One can't help admiring this wonderful tenacity."

"You and I are horridly old-fashioned, Letitia."

"And we must reform," she declared emphatically. "It can't go on any longer. To us, New York seems funny, doesn't it? And the complicated relationships are so peculiar. An old woman (I beg her pardon, I mean a woman who, years ago, would have been old) and her daughter, think nothing of marrying brothers, and becoming all sorts of impossible relations to each other. Even that most hackneyed of all comic institutions, the mother-in-law, is a light and airy creature in this country, and has no rooted objection to being sued by her own daughter for alienating the affections of her own son-in-law."

Letitia's exaggerations made me laugh. But it did her good to think them up and I made no protests. I was glad to see that she was herself again, and that the nerve-racking noise of the packing no longer disturbed her as acutely as it had done.

"These family hotels simplify things, of course," she said. "They do away with all fuss and feathers. A man takes an elegantly furnished suite, and just asks in a wife! An old lady engages a handsome apartment and fishes up a husband to live in it with her. The mÉnage starts immediately. No furnishers, and decorators, and upholsterers, and servants are necessary. Monsieur and Madame are at home instantly. In the old days, the establishment of a home meant everything. Now it is established almost as easily as it is broken up."

"We're ready for the bedroom, now"—Joe appeared again—"and if you wouldn't mind stepping into the kitchen! Sorry to disturb you, mum!"

There was nothing pathetic about the kitchen. The sight of the kitchen certainly awakened no regrets. The things were all packed, but we gazed stolidly around us, at the place that had made home-life impossible.

"The poor still have their homes, Letitia," I said, "and the working people have not yet experienced all the signs of the times that you mention."

"They will come to it," she declared—and I couldn't help smiling at her earnestness; "they are just waiting. Perhaps next century there will be no work-people. The trades-unions are doing their best. You wonder how I know all these things, Archie. Yes, you do; I can see it in your face. Well, I'll tell you. For the last month I have been reading nothing but these subjects. I haven't touched Ovid or Cicero. I don't believe I ever shall again. I am so fearfully interested in a condition of society that votes all labor a nuisance and consigns the 'sweat of the brow' to the luxury of the Turkish bath."

"To think that cook has led us to this!" I murmured.

"Cook is the all-pervading evil, Archie. She is the outward manifestation of this spirit of unrest. Mrs. Potzenheimer is but a type; Birdie Miriam McCaffrey is merely symbolic; Madame Hyacinthe de Lyrolle is simply—"

"Unfit for publication, my dear," I interposed, and we both smiled. The rays of a gentle optimism were beginning to soothe us, as we realized our own non-responsibility in the matter of Fate, personified by Cook! At any rate, she had left us together. She had been powerless to separate us.

It was over. We stood in the street and watched the last relics of our little home, as they were placed in the storage-house wagons. They stood on the pavement for rude little boys to stare at, awaiting the helping hands of Jim, and Sam, and Joe. The Indian cabinet seemed to blink in the sun, as it rested on the sidewalk, preparatory to its journey.

"Poor thing!" said Letitia, with a little gulp, as it was finally hoisted into the wagon. "It was only meant to be ornamental. It tried hard. It did its best. It stood by us, Archie, as long as it could. I hate to think of it, locked up in seclusion, with nobody to look at it."

"There's our bureau!" I interrupted, as the pretty bit of furniture that had been honored by the encumbrance of Letitia's dainty toilet silver made its appearance out of doors, in the stark daylight. "I never realized until now what a beauty it was. How they bang it about! They have no respect for furniture. Here, you Jim"—to the son of toil—"try and be careful. Honestly, Letitia, these household goods of ours seem to be reproaching us."

"Dear old inanimates!" she cried. "I dare say they know that we couldn't help it, that we were the victims of—Cook. Oh, Archie, there's the tiger-head, tied up, but still quite recognizable."

The head had escaped from the restraining cords. It was salient, and impressive. The mouth of the tiger was open, in a snarl, and the glass eyes shone. Jim placed it on a chest of drawers, for which he was making a corner in the wagon. Letitia approached it in a sort of surreptitious manner, and patted the head. Then the foolish girl leaned forward and deliberately kissed the soft, smooth fur. Two little boys grinned derisively, and seemed to congratulate themselves upon their excellent position for a free show.

The cab that was to take us to our family hotel stood at the door, and the trunks, containing our wearing-apparel, were laboriously placed upon it by the men. It was ready for us, but we could not tear ourselves away from the uncanny fascination of the wagons. Letitia held my arm, and we watched each fragment of our broken home, as it was lifted from our view into the recesses of the greedy vehicle.

"Perhaps," I said, with a suspicious tremor in my voice, "we shall see them again before very long. They are still ours, Letitia. I—I—shall pay for their board every month; it—it will be a pleasure to do so. You know, my girl, we can—we can call them back at any moment."

A large tear was trickling down Letitia's cheek, as she saw the men take their places on the wagons and realized that this—this was, indeed, the very end.

"No, Archie," she said, "we shall never call them back. We shall never dare to do it. And, in the years to come, our experiences with these dear old things—that, later on, we shall sell—will sound like some absurd and far-fetched story that a new generation will never credit. The question that has broken us will be solved only in the way in which we are trying to solve it. There is, and there will be, no other solution."

Jim smacked a whip; a huge "home"-laden wagon groaned and labored for a moment; then it slowly and reluctantly moved away. We watched it until it reached the corner and turned from our sight. The tears were streaming down Letitia's face, and I must confess that I bit my mustache so ferociously that I left ragged ends.

"Come, my girl," I said in a low voice, as I opened the door of the cab. She got in, and I followed. We leaned back, heavy, silent, and with a mortal sorrow in our hearts. Then—then—

We were driven swiftly away to a new condition of things, in which the cooks shall cease from troubling, and we shall be at rest.

THE END