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One afternoon, hearing a great commotion in the kitchen and looking in, I saw Mrs. Hickey's dejected form seated between two baskets heaped with clean linen. She was crying and moaning and rubbing up and down her poor varicose-veined legs. She had taken the linen as usual to my mother, but on arriving at the hotel she was told that the lady had gone away without leaving an address. It was a tragedy. No money for the washing -- her weeping, kindly eyes turned to me -- and a child on her hands, unpaid for.

I was shocked, and my first impulse was to come forward and give the address of my grandfather's country house. I knew it perfectly well, but ... I also knew that it would mean going back to my mother. For the first time I stood alone and acted on my own initiative. Deliberately I remained silent, as children often do, and I effaced all memory of my life at Chestnut Hill. In perfect innocence I took my part in the general upheaval that was to follow.

My mother's neglecting to pay Mrs. Hickey brought about an astonishing series of calamities in that poor household. Firs of all cheaper rooms had to be found; and this time they were on the ground floor, on the court-yard. There was one bedroom, a kitchen, and a sort of closet. The bedroom was for Mike. Mrs. Hickey, myself, and a frowsey relation -- who also helped with the washing -- slept altogether in the closet. I can still smell the odor of that shut-in pen -- a mixture of unwashed bodies and beer. Mrs. Hickey and her relation drank a great deal of beer, and I was usually sent to fetch it from the "corner saloon".

No sooner were we settled in our new place than Mike was taken ill with fever. A nurse was called in, adding to the already over-crowded condition of the household. All night I would sit up with her in order to escape the bed-bugs which infested the tenement house. I remember the nurse's sympathy, and her holding me on her lap, sometimes, while I slept.