The days went relentlessly on for Cartice Doring, as days have a way of doing for everybody. One trouble had grown to proportions so huge that his hateful shape blotted out all the rest, and his name was Poverty. The bread of dependence is bitter. Every bite to her was heavy as lead. Civilization has many tortures; but it is doubtful if it has any more cruel than this.
Every waking moment Cartice racked her brain in the effort to think of some means of earning money, and at night when she slept her dreams were full of horrors. Thoughts of the river obtruded themselves and were driven away only to come back more determined in aspect than before.
Somewhere she had read that if every suicide would but wait twenty-four hours after determining to end life, deliverance would come. So she waited, and the worst depression would pass, and her courage come slowly back.
Meantime her husband walked the street in his helpless way seeking employment, returning at night with the story of failure written on his face.
Cartice had been used to a busy life, and the enforced idleness of those depressing days was more of a weariness to both flesh and spirit than the hardest labor would have been. In trying to escape from her own thoughts she sometimes walked long distances. One cold day she was accosted by a woman who asked her to buy some trifle she was selling.
“I wish I could, but I cannot, for I have no money,” said Cartice.
“Ah, don’t say that,” said the other, with incredulity and disgust in her voice. “So many say it when it isn’t true. It is impossible that any one so comfortably dressed as you, is without money. Compare your warm and beautiful wrap with my thin shawl.”
“It is true I have a good cloak,” Cartice answered, “but I am probably poorer than you, for I cannot pay for either my shelter or my food. Your position is superior to mine, for you are trying to earn a livelihood, while I am longing to do so and know not where to begin. And besides poverty I have other woes from which I hope you are exempt. I tell you this that hereafter you may not judge from appearances. Many whom you envy are, perhaps, more miserable than yourself.”
Her old childish fancies came back to her sometimes, and she would half believe that some good fairy would suddenly comfort her and mercifully change everything. And her people—the dear, kind, fond, ever-courteous people of her very own world, unseen by all who had not sympathetic eyes, came to comfort her. The inner world in which they dwelt afforded her a refuge when the miseries of the outer one became too heavy. Perhaps it was because of much time spent there that she scarcely took on the ways and speech of this world. There was ever something unusual and not easy to understand in her presence, something that suggested another and a different world.
“O my own people, my dear people of my dreams! How far I have wandered in my search for others like you clothed in the flesh!” she said, on returning from a long walk one evening, as she looked at the dingy hotel where she was obliged to take unwelcome refuge.