She waited. But Gerald did not come. She could hear chiefly the steady

hum of the voices of the executioner and his aids. She reflected that

the room in which they were must be at the back. The other sounds in

the hotel grew less noticeable. Then, after an age, she heard a door

open, and a low voice say something commandingly in French, and then a

'Oui, monsieur,' and a general descent of the stairs. The executioner

and his aids were leaving. "You," cried a drunken English voice from an

upper floor--it was the middle-aged Englishman translating what the

executioner had said--"you, you will take the head." Then a rough

laugh, and the repeating voice of the Englishman's girl, still pursuing

her studies in English: "You will take ze 'ead. Yess, sair." And

another laugh. At length quiet reigned in the hotel. Sophia said to

herself: "I won't stir from this bed till it's all over and Gerald

comes back!"

She dozed, under the sheet, and was awakened by a tremendous shrieking,

growling, and yelling: a phenomenon of human bestiality that far

surpassed Sophia's narrow experiences. Shut up though she was in a

room, perfectly secure, the mad fury of that crowd, balked at the

inlets to the square, thrilled and intimidated her. It sounded as if

they would be capable of tearing the very horses to pieces. "I must

stay where I am," she murmured. And even while saying it she rose and

went to the window again and peeped out. The torture involved was

extreme, but she had not sufficient force within her to resist the

fascination. She stared greedily into the bright square. The first

thing she saw was Gerald coming out of a house opposite, followed after

a few seconds by the girl with whom he had previously been talking.

Gerald glanced hastily up at the facade of the hotel, and then

approached as near as he could to the red columns, in front of which

were now drawn a line of gendarmes with naked swords. A second and

larger waggon, with two horses, waited by the side of the other one.

The racket beyond the square continued and even grew louder. But the

couple of hundred persons within the cordons, and all the inhabitants

of the windows, drunk and sober, gazed in a fixed and sinister

enchantment at the region of the guillotine, as Sophia gazed. "I cannot

stand this!" she told herself in horror, but she could not move; she

could not move even her eyes.

At intervals the crowd would burst out in a violent staccato--

"Le voila! Nicholas! Ah! Ah! Ah!"

And the final 'Ah' was devilish.

Then a gigantic passionate roar, the culmination of the mob's fierce

savagery, crashed against the skies. The line of maddened horses

swerved and reared, and seemed to fall on the furious multitude while

the statue-like gendarmes rocked over them. It was a last effort to

break the cordon, and it failed.

From the little street at the rear of the guillotine appeared a priest,

walking backwards, and holding a crucifix high in his right hand, and

behind him came the handsome hero, his body all crossed with cords,

between two warders, who pressed against him and supported him on

either side. He was certainly very young. He lifted his chin gallantly,

but his face was incredibly white. Sophia discerned that the priest was

trying to hide the sight of the guillotine from the prisoner with his

body, just as in the story which she had heard at dinner.

Except the voice of the priest, indistinctly rising and falling in the

prayer for the dying, there was no sound in the square or its environs.

The windows were now occupied by groups turned to stone with distended

eyes fixed on the little procession. Sophia had a tightening of the

throat, and the hand trembled by which she held the curtain. The

central figure did not seem to her to be alive; but rather a doll, a

marionette wound up to imitate the action of a tragedy. She saw the

priest offer the crucifix to the mouth of the marionette, which with a

clumsy unhuman shoving of its corded shoulders butted the thing away.

And as the procession turned and stopped she could plainly see that the

marionette's nape and shoulders were bare, his shirt having been slit.

It was horrible. "Why do I stay here?" she asked herself hysterically.

But she did not stir. The victim had disappeared now in the midst of a

group of men. Then she perceived him prone under the red column,

between the grooves. The silence was now broken only by the tinkling of

the horses' bits in the corners of the square. The line of gendarmes in

front of the scaffold held their swords tightly and looked over their

noses, ignoring the privileged groups that peered almost between their

shoulders.

And Sophia waited, horror-struck. She saw nothing but the gleaming

triangle of metal that was suspended high above the prone, attendant

victim. She felt like a lost soul, torn too soon from shelter, and

exposed for ever to the worst hazards of destiny. Why was she in this

strange, incomprehensible town, foreign and inimical to her, watching

with agonized glance this cruel, obscene spectacle? Her sensibilities

were all a bleeding mass of wounds. Why? Only yesterday, and she had

been, an innocent, timid creature in Bursley, in Axe, a foolish

creature who deemed the concealment of letters a supreme excitement.

Either that day or this day was not real. Why was she imprisoned alone

in that odious, indescribably odious hotel, with no one to soothe and

comfort her, and carry her away?

The distant bell boomed once. Then a monosyllabic voice sounded, sharp,

low, nervous; she recognized the voice of the executioner, whose name

she had heard but could not remember. There was a clicking noise.

She shrank down to the floor in terror and loathing, and hid her face,

and shuddered. Shriek after shriek, from various windows, rang on her

ears in a fusillade; and then the mad yell of the penned crowd, which,

like herself, had not seen but had heard, extinguished all other noise.

Justice was done. The great ambition of Gerald's life was at last

satisfied.

Later, amid the stir of the hotel, there came a knock at her door,

impatient and nervous. Forgetting, in her tribulation, that she was

without her bodice, she got up from the floor in a kind of miserable

dream, and opened. Chirac stood on the landing, and he had Gerald by

the arm. Chirac looked worn out, curiously fragile and pathetic; but

Gerald was the very image of death. The attainment of ambition had

utterly destroyed his equilibrium; his curiosity had proved itself

stronger than his stomach. Sophia would have pitied him had she in that

moment been capable of pity. Gerald staggered past her into the room,

and sank with a groan on to the bed. Not long since he had been proudly

conversing with impudent women. Now, in swift collapse, he was as

flaccid as a sick hound and as disgusting as an aged drunkard.

"He is some little souffrant," said Chirac, weakly.

Sophia perceived in Chirac's tone the assumption that of course her

present duty was to devote herself to the task of restoring her shamed

husband to his manly pride.

"And what about me?" she thought bitterly.

The fat woman ascended the stairs like a tottering blancmange, and

began to gabble to Sophia, who understood nothing whatever.

"She wants sixty francs," Chirac said, and in answer to Sophia's

startled question, he explained that Gerald had agreed to pay a hundred

francs for the room, which was the landlady's own--fifty francs in

advance and the fifty after the execution. The other ten was for the

dinner. The landlady, distrusting the whole of her clientele, was

collecting her accounts instantly on the completion of the spectacle.

Sophia made no remark as to Gerald's lie to her. Indeed, Chirac had

heard it. She knew Gerald for a glib liar to others, but she was

naively surprised when he practised upon herself.

"Gerald! Do you hear?" she said coldly.

The amateur of severed heads only groaned.

With a movement of irritation she went to him and felt in his pockets

for his purse; he acquiesced, still groaning. Chirac helped her to

choose and count the coins.

The fat woman, appeased, pursued her way.

"Good-bye, madame!" said Chirac, with his customary courtliness,

transforming the landing of the hideous hotel into some imperial

antechamber.

"Are you going away?" she asked, in surprise. Her distress was so

obvious that it tremendously flattered him. He would have stayed if he

could. But he had to return to Paris to write and deliver his article.

"To-morrow, I hope!" he murmured sympathetically, kissing her hand. The

gesture atoned somewhat for the sordidness of her situation, and even

corrected the faults of her attire. Always afterwards it seemed to her

that Chirac was an old and intimate friend; he had successfully passed

through the ordeal of seeing 'the wrong side' of the stuff of her life.

She shut the door on him with a lingering glance, and reconciled

herself to her predicament.

Gerald slept. Just as he was, he slept heavily.

This was what he had brought her to, then! The horrors of the night, of

the dawn, and of the morning! Ineffable suffering and humiliation;

anguish and torture that could never be forgotten! And after a fatuous

vigil of unguessed license, he had tottered back, an offensive beast,

to sleep the day away in that filthy chamber! He did not possess even

enough spirit to play the role of roysterer to the end. And she was

bound to him; far, far from any other human aid; cut off irrevocably by

her pride from those who perhaps would have protected her from his

dangerous folly. The deep conviction henceforward formed a permanent

part of her general consciousness that he was simply an irresponsible

and thoughtless fool! He was without sense. Such was her brilliant and

godlike husband, the man who had given her the right to call herself a

married woman! He was a fool. With all her ignorance of the world she

could see that nobody but an arrant imbecile could have brought her to

the present pass. Her native sagacity revolted. Gusts of feeling came

over her in which she could have thrashed him into the realization of

his responsibilities.

Sticking out of the breast-pocket of his soiled coat was the packet

which he had received on the previous day. If he had not already lost

it, he could only thank his luck. She took it. There were English

bank-notes in it for two hundred pounds, a letter from a banker, and

other papers. With precautions against noise she tore the envelope and

the letter and papers into small pieces, and then looked about for a

place to hide them. A cupboard suggested itself. She got on a chair,

and pushed the fragments out of sight on the topmost shelf, where they

may well be to this day. She finished dressing, and then sewed the

notes into the lining of her skirt. She had no silly, delicate notions

about stealing. She obscurely felt that, in the care of a man like

Gerald, she might find herself in the most monstrous, the most

impossible dilemmas. Those notes, safe and secret in her skirt, gave

her confidence, reassured her against the perils of the future, and

endowed her with independence. The act was characteristic of her

enterprise and of her fundamental prudence. It approached the heroic.

And her conscience hotly defended its righteousness.

She decided that when he discovered his loss, she would merely deny all

knowledge of the envelope, for he had not spoken a word to her about

it. He never mentioned the details of money; he had a fortune. However,

the necessity for this untruth did not occur. He made no reference

whatever to his loss. The fact was, he thought he had been careless

enough to let the envelope be filched from him during the excesses of

the night.

All day till evening Sophia sat on a dirty chair, without food, while

Gerald slept. She kept repeating to herself, in amazed resentment: "A

hundred francs for this room! A hundred francs! And he hadn't the pluck

to tell me!" She could not have expressed her contempt.

Long before sheer ennui forced her to look out of the window again,

every sign of justice had been removed from the square. Nothing

whatever remained in the heavy August sunshine save gathered heaps of

filth where the horses had reared and caracoled.

CHAPTER IV

A CRISIS FOR GERALD

I

For a time there existed in the minds of both Gerald and Sophia the

remarkable notion that twelve thousand pounds represented the infinity

of wealth, that this sum possessed special magical properties which

rendered it insensible to the process of subtraction. It seemed

impossible that twelve thousand pounds, while continually getting less,

could ultimately quite disappear. The notion lived longer in the mind

of Gerald than in that of Sophia; for Gerald would never look at a

disturbing fact, whereas Sophia's gaze was morbidly fascinated by such

phenomena. In a life devoted to travel and pleasure Gerald meant not to

spend more than six hundred a year, the interest on his fortune. Six

hundred a year is less than two pounds a day, yet Gerald never paid

less than two pounds a day in hotel bills alone. He hoped that he was

living on a thousand a year, had a secret fear that he might be

spending fifteen hundred, and was really spending about two thousand

five hundred. Still, the remarkable notion of the inexhaustibility of

twelve thousand pounds always reassured him. The faster the money went,

the more vigorously this notion flourished in Gerald's mind. When

twelve had unaccountably dwindled to three, Gerald suddenly decided

that he must act, and in a few months he lost two thousand on the Paris

Bourse. The adventure frightened him, and in his panic he scattered a

couple of hundred in a frenzy of high living.

But even with only twenty thousand francs left out of three hundred

thousand, he held closely to the belief that natural laws would in his

case somehow be suspended. He had heard of men who were once rich

begging bread and sweeping crossings, but he felt quite secure against

such risks, by simple virtue of the axiom that he was he. However, he

meant to assist the axiom by efforts to earn money. When these

continued to fail, he tried to assist the axiom by borrowing money; but

he found that his uncle had definitely done with him. He would have

assisted the axiom by stealing money, but he had neither the nerve nor

the knowledge to be a swindler; he was not even sufficiently expert to

cheat at cards.

He had thought in thousands. Now he began to think in hundreds, in

tens, daily and hourly. He paid two hundred francs in railway fares in

order to live economically in a village, and shortly afterwards another

two hundred francs in railway fares in order to live economically in

Paris. And to celebrate the arrival in Paris and the definite

commencement of an era of strict economy and serious search for a

livelihood, he spent a hundred francs on a dinner at the Maison Doree

and two balcony stalls at the Gymnase. In brief, he omitted nothing--no

act, no resolve, no self-deception--of the typical fool in his

situation; always convinced that his difficulties and his wisdom were

quite exceptional.

In May, 1870, on an afternoon, he was ranging nervously to and fro in a

three-cornered bedroom of a little hotel at the angle of the Rue

Fontaine and the Rue Laval (now the Rue Victor Masse), within half a

minute of the Boulevard de Clichy. It had come to that--an exchange of

the 'grand boulevard' for the 'boulevard exterieur'! Sophia sat on a

chair at the grimy window, glancing down in idle disgust of life at the

Clichy-Odeon omnibus which was casting off its tip-horse at the corner

of the Rue Chaptal. The noise of petty, hurried traffic over the bossy

paving stones was deafening. The locality was not one to correspond

with an ideal. There was too much humanity crowded into those narrow

hilly streets; humanity seemed to be bulging out at the windows of the

high houses. Gerald healed his pride by saying that this was, after

all, the real Paris, and that the cookery was as good as could be got

anywhere, pay what you would. He seldom ate a meal in the little salons

on the first floor without becoming ecstatic upon the cookery. To hear

him, he might have chosen the hotel on its superlative merits, without

regard to expense. And with his air of use and custom, he did indeed

look like a connoisseur of Paris who knew better than to herd with

vulgar tourists in the pens of the Madeleine quarter. He was dressed

with some distinction; good clothes, when put to the test, survive a

change of fortune, as a Roman arch survives the luxury of departed

empire. Only his collar, large V-shaped front, and wristbands, which

bore the ineffaceable signs of cheap laundering, reflected the shadow

of impending disaster.

He glanced sideways, stealthily, at Sophia. She, too, was still dressed

with distinction; in the robe of black faille, the cashmere shawl, and

the little black hat with its falling veil, there was no apparent

symptom of beggary. She would have been judged as one of those women

who content themselves with few clothes but good, and, greatly aided by

nature, make a little go a long way. Good black will last for eternity;

it discloses no secrets of modification and mending, and it is not

transparent.

At last Gerald, resuming a suspended conversation, said as it were

doggedly:

"I tell you I haven't got five francs altogether! and you can feel my

pockets if you like," added the habitual liar in him, fearing

incredulity.

"Well, and what do you expect me to do?" Sophia inquired.

The accent, at once ironic and listless, in which she put this

question, showed that strange and vital things had happened to Sophia

in the four years which had elapsed since her marriage. It did really

seem to her, indeed, that the Sophia whom Gerald had espoused was dead

and gone, and that another Sophia had come into her body: so intensely

conscious was she of a fundamental change in herself under the stress

of continuous experience. And though this was but a seeming, though she

was still the same Sophia more fully disclosed, it was a true seeming.

Indisputably more beautiful than when Gerald had unwillingly made her

his legal wife, she was now nearly twenty-four, and looked perhaps

somewhat older than her age. Her frame was firmly set, her waist

thicker, neither slim nor stout. The lips were rather hard, and she had

a habit of tightening her mouth, on the same provocation as sends a

snail into its shell. No trace was left of immature gawkiness in her

gestures or of simplicity in her intonations. She was a woman of

commanding and slightly arrogant charm, not in the least degree the

charm of innocence and ingenuousness. Her eyes were the eyes of one who

has lost her illusions too violently and too completely. Her gaze,

coldly comprehending, implied familiarity with the abjectness of human

nature. Gerald had begun and had finished her education. He had not

ruined her, as a bad professor may ruin a fine voice, because her moral

force immeasurably exceeded his; he had unwittingly produced a

masterpiece, but it was a tragic masterpiece. Sophia was such a woman

as, by a mere glance as she utters an opinion, will make a man say to

himself, half in desire and half in alarm lest she reads him too: "By

Jove! she must have been through a thing or two. She knows what people

are!"

The marriage was, of course, a calamitous folly. From the very first,

from the moment when the commercial traveller had with incomparable

rash fatuity thrown the paper pellet over the counter, Sophia's

awakening commonsense had told her that in yielding to her instinct she

was sowing misery and shame for herself; but she had gone on, as if

under a spell. It had needed the irretrievableness of flight from home

to begin the breaking of the trance. Once fully awakened out of the

trance, she had recognized her marriage for what it was. She had made

neither the best nor the worst of it. She had accepted Gerald as one

accepts a climate. She saw again and again that he was irreclaimably a

fool and a prodigy of irresponsibleness. She tolerated him, now with

sweetness, now bitterly; accepting always his caprices, and not

permitting herself to have wishes of her own. She was ready to pay the

price of pride and of a moment's imbecility with a lifetime of

self-repression. It was high, but it was the price. She had acquired

nothing but an exceptionally good knowledge of the French language (she

soon learnt to scorn Gerald's glib maltreatment of the tongue), and she

had conserved nothing but her dignity. She knew that Gerald was sick of

her, that he would have danced for joy to be rid of her; that he was

constantly unfaithful; that he had long since ceased to be excited by

her beauty. She knew also that at bottom he was a little afraid of her;

here was her sole moral consolation. The thing that sometimes struck

her as surprising was that he had not abandoned her, simply and crudely

walked off one day and forgotten to take her with him.

They hated each other, but in different ways. She loathed him, and he

resented her.

"What do I expect you to do?" he repeated after her. "Why don't you

write home to your people and get some money out of them?"

Now that he had said what was in his mind, he faced her with a bullying

swagger. Had he been a bigger man he might have tried the effect of

physical bullying on her. One of his numerous reasons for resenting her

was that she was the taller of the two.

She made no reply.

"Now you needn't turn pale and begin all that fuss over again. What I'm

suggesting is a perfectly reasonable thing. If I haven't got money I

haven't got it. I can't invent it."

She perceived that he was ready for one of their periodical tempestuous

quarrels. But that day she felt too tired and unwell to quarrel. His

warning against a repetition of 'fuss' had reference to the gastric

dizziness from which she had been suffering for two years. It would

take her usually after a meal. She did not swoon, but her head swam and

she could not stand. She would sink down wherever she happened to be,

and, her face alarmingly white, murmur faintly: "My salts." Within five

minutes the attack had gone and left no trace. She had been through one

just after lunch. He resented this affection. He detested being

compelled to hand the smelling-bottle to her, and he would have avoided

doing so if her pallor did not always alarm him. Nothing but this

pallor convinced him that the attacks were not a deep ruse to impress

him. His attitude invariably implied that she could cure the malady if

she chose, but that through obstinacy she did not choose.

"Are you going to have the decency to answer my question, or aren't

you?"

"What question?" Her vibrating voice was low and restrained.

"Will you write to your people?"

"For money?"

The sarcasm of her tone was diabolic. She could not have kept the

sarcasm out of her tone; she did not attempt to keep it out. She cared

little if it whipped him to fury. Did he imagine, seriously, that she

would be capable of going on her knees to her family? She? Was he

unaware that his wife was the proudest and the most obstinate woman on

earth; that all her behaviour to him was the expression of her pride

and her obstinacy? Ill and weak though she felt, she marshalled

together all the forces of her character to defend her resolve never,

never to eat the bread of humiliation. She was absolutely determined to

be dead to her family. Certainly, one December, several years

previously, she had seen English Christmas cards in an English shop in

the Rue de Rivoli, and in a sudden gush of tenderness towards

Constance, she had despatched a coloured greeting to Constance and her

mother. And having initiated the custom, she had continued it. That was

not like asking a kindness; it was bestowing a kindness. But except for

the annual card, she was dead to St. Luke's Square. She was one of

those daughters who disappear and are not discussed in the family

circle. The thought of her immense foolishness, the little tender

thoughts of Constance, some flitting souvenir, full of unwilling

admiration, of a regal gesture of her mother,--these things only

steeled her against any sort of resurrection after death.

And he was urging her to write home for money! Why, she would not even

have paid a visit in splendour to St. Luke's Square. Never should they

know what she had suffered! And especially her Aunt Harriet, from whom

she had stolen!

"Will you write to your people?" he demanded yet again, emphasizing and

separating each word.

"No," she said shortly, with terrible disdain.

"Why not?"

"Because I won't." The curling line of her lips, as they closed on each

other, said all the rest; all the cruel truths about his unspeakable,

inane, coarse follies, his laziness, his excesses, his lies, his

deceptions, his bad faith, his truculence, his improvidence, his

shameful waste and ruin of his life and hers. She doubted whether he

realized his baseness and her wrongs, but if he could not read them in

her silent contumely, she was too proud to recite them to him. She had

never complained, save in uncontrolled moments of anger.

"If that's the way you're going to talk--all right!" he snapped,

furious. Evidently he was baffled.

She kept silence. She was determined to see what he would do in the

face of her inaction.

"You know, I'm not joking," he pursued. "We shall starve."

"Very well," she agreed. "We shall starve."

She watched him surreptitiously, and she was almost sure that he really

had come to the end of his tether. His voice, which never alone

convinced, carried a sort of conviction now. He was penniless. In four

years he had squandered twelve thousand pounds, and had nothing to show

for it except an enfeebled digestion and a tragic figure of a wife. One

small point of satisfaction there was--and all the Baines in her

clutched at it and tried to suck satisfaction from it--their manner of

travelling about from hotel to hotel had made it impossible for Gerald

to run up debts. A few debts he might have, unknown to her, but they

could not be serious.

So they looked at one another, in hatred and despair. The inevitable

had arrived. For months she had fronted it in bravado, not concealing

from herself that it lay in waiting. For years he had been sure that

though the inevitable might happen to others it could not happen to

him. There it was! He was conscious of a heavy weight in his stomach,

and she of a general numbness, enwrapping her fatigue. Even then he

could not believe that it was true, this disaster. As for Sophia she

was reconciling herself with bitter philosophy to the eccentricities of

fate. Who would have dreamed that she, a young girl brought up, etc?

Her mother could not have improved the occasion more uncompromisingly

than Sophia did--behind that disdainful mask.

"Well--if that's it...!" Gerald exploded at length, puffing. And he

puffed out of the room and was gone in a second.

II

She languidly picked up a book, the moment Gerald had departed, and

tried to prove to herself that she was sufficiently in command of her

nerves to read. For a long time reading had been her chief solace. But

she could not read. She glanced round the inhospitable chamber, and

thought of the hundreds of rooms--some splendid and some vile, but all

arid in their unwelcoming aspect--through which she had passed in her

progress from mad exultation to calm and cold disgust. The ceaseless

din of the street annoyed her jaded ears. And a great wave of desire

for peace, peace of no matter what kind, swept through her. And then

her deep distrust of Gerald reawakened; in spite of his seriously

desperate air, which had a quality of sincerity quite new in her

experience of him, she could not be entirely sure that, in asserting

utter penury, he was not after all merely using a trick to get rid of

her.

She sprang up, threw the book on the bed, and seized her gloves. She

would follow him, if she could. She would do what she had never done

before--she would spy on him. Fighting against her lassitude, she

descended the long winding stairs, and peeped forth from the doorway

into the street. The ground floor of the hotel was a wine-shop; the

stout landlord was lightly flicking one of the three little yellow

tables that stood on the pavement. He smiled with his customary

benevolence, and silently pointed in the direction of the Rue Notre

Dame de Lorette. She saw Gerald down there in the distance. He was

smoking a cigar.

He seemed to be a little man without a care. The smoke of the cigar

came first round his left cheek and then round his right, sailing away

into nothing. He walked with a gay spring, but not quickly, flourishing

his cane as freely as the traffic of the pavement would permit,

glancing into all the shop windows and into the eyes of all the women

under forty. This was not at all the same man as had a moment ago been

spitting angry menaces at her in the bedroom of the hotel. It was a

fellow of blithe charm, ripe for any adventurous joys that destiny had

to offer.

Supposing he turned round and saw her?

If he turned round and saw her and asked her what she was doing there

in the street, she would tell him plainly: "I'm following you, to find

out what you do."

But he did not turn. He went straight forward, deviating at the church,

where the crowd became thicker, into the Rue du Faubourg Montmartre,

and so to the boulevard, which he crossed. The whole city seemed

excited and vivacious. Cannons boomed in slow succession, and flags

were flying. Sophia had no conception of the significance of those

guns, for, though she read a great deal, she never read a newspaper;

the idea of opening a newspaper never occurred to her. But she was

accustomed to the feverish atmosphere of Paris. She had lately seen

regiments of cavalry flashing and prancing in the Luxembourg Gardens,

and had much admired the fine picture. She accepted the booming as

another expression of the high spirits that had to find vent somehow in

this feverish empire. She so accepted it and forgot it, using all the

panorama of the capital as a dim background for her exacerbated egoism.

She was obliged to walk slowly, because Gerald walked slowly. A

beautiful woman, or any woman not positively hag-like or venerable, who

walks slowly in the streets of Paris becomes at once the cause of

inconvenient desires, as representing the main objective on earth,

always transcending in importance politics and affairs. Just as a true

patriotic Englishman cannot be too busy to run after a fox, so a

Frenchman is always ready to forsake all in order to follow a woman

whom he has never before set eyes on. Many men thought twice about her,

with her romantic Saxon mystery of temperament, and her Parisian

clothes; but all refrained from affronting her, not in the least out of

respect for the gloom in her face, but from an expert conviction that

those rapt eyes were fixed immovably on another male. She walked

unscathed amid the frothing hounds as though protected by a spell.

On the south side of the boulevard, Gerald proceeded down the Rue

Montmartre, and then turned suddenly into the Rue Croissant. Sophia

stopped and asked the price of some combs which were exposed outside a

little shop. Then she went on, boldly passing the end of the Rue

Croissant. No shadow of Gerald! She saw the signs of newspapers all

along the street, Le Bien Public, La Presse Libre, La Patrie. There was

a creamery at the corner. She entered it, asked for a cup of chocolate

and sat down. She wanted to drink coffee, but every doctor had

forbidden coffee to her, on account of her attacks of dizziness. Then,

having ordered chocolate, she felt that, on this occasion, when she had

need of strength in her great fatigue, only coffee could suffice her,

and she changed the order. She was close to the door, and Gerald could

not escape her vigilance if he emerged at that end of the street. She

drank the coffee with greedy satisfaction, and waited in the creamery

till she began to feel conspicuous there. And then Gerald went by the

door, within six feet of her. He turned the corner and continued his

descent of the Rue Montmartre. She paid for her coffee and followed the

chase. Her blood seemed to be up. Her lips were tightened, and her

thought was: "Wherever he goes, I'll go, and I don't care what

happens." She despised him. She felt herself above him. She felt that

somehow, since quitting the hotel, he had been gradually growing more

and more vile and meet to be exterminated. She imagined infamies as to

the Rue Croissant. There was no obvious ground for this intensifying of

her attitude towards him; it was merely the result of the chase. All

that could be definitely charged against him was the smoking of a cigar.

He stepped into a tobacco-shop, and came out with a longer cigar than

the first one, a more expensive article, stripped off its collar and

lighted it as a millionaire might have lighted it. This was the man who

swore that he did not possess five francs.

She tracked him as far as the Rue de Rivoli, and then lost him. There

were vast surging crowds in the Rue de Rivoli, and much bunting, and

soldiers and gesticulatory policemen. The general effect of the street

was that all things were brightly waving in the breeze. She was caught

in the crowd as in the current of a stream, and when she tried to sidle

out of it into a square, a row of smiling policemen barred her passage;

she was a part of the traffic that they had to regulate. She drifted

till the Louvre came into view. After all, Gerald had only strolled

forth to see the sight of the day, whatever it might be! She knew not

what it was. She had no curiosity about it. In the middle of all that

thickening mass of humanity, staring with one accord at the vast

monument of royal and imperial vanities, she thought, with her

characteristic grimness, of the sacrifice of her whole career as a

school-teacher for the chance of seeing Gerald once a quarter in the

shop. She gloated over that, as a sick appetite will gloat over tainted

food. And she saw the shop, and the curve of the stairs up to the

showroom, and the pier-glass in the showroom.

Then the guns began to boom again, and splendid carriages swept one

after another from under a majestic archway and glittered westward down

a lane of spotless splendid uniforms. The carriages were laden with

still more splendid uniforms, and with enchanting toilets. Sophia, in

her modestly stylish black, mechanically noticed how much easier it was

for attired women to sit in a carriage now that crinolines had gone.

That was the sole impression made upon her by this glimpse of the last

fete of the Napoleonic Empire. She knew not that the supreme pillars of

imperialism were exhibiting themselves before her; and that the eyes of

those uniforms and those toilettes were full of the legendary beauty of

Eugenie, and their ears echoing to the long phrases of Napoleon the

Third about his gratitude to his people for their confidence in him as

shown by the plebiscite, and about the ratification of constitutional

reforms guaranteeing order, and about the empire having been

strengthened at its base, and about showing force by moderation and

envisaging the future without fear, and about the bosom of peace and

liberty, and the eternal continuance of his dynasty.

She just wondered vaguely what was afoot.

When the last carriage had rolled away, and the guns and acclamations

had ceased, the crowd at length began to scatter. She was carried by it

into the Place du Palais Royal, and in a few moments she managed to

withdraw into the Rue des Bons Enfants and was free.

The coins in her purse amounted to three sous, and therefore, though

she felt exhausted to the point of illness, she had to return to the

hotel on foot. Very slowly she crawled upwards in the direction of the

Boulevard, through the expiring gaiety of the city. Near the Bourse a

fiacre overtook her, and in the fiacre were Gerald and a woman. Gerald

had not seen her; he was talking eagerly to his ornate companion. All

his body was alive. The fiacre was out of sight in a moment, but Sophia

judged instantly the grade of the woman, who was evidently of the

discreet class that frequented the big shops of an afternoon with

something of their own to sell.

Sophia's grimness increased. The pace of the fiacre, her fatigued body,

Gerald's delightful, careless vivacity, the attractive streaming veil

of the nice, modest courtesan--everything conspired to increase it.

III

Gerald returned to the bedroom which contained his wife and all else

that he owned in the world at about nine o'clock that evening. Sophia

was in bed. She had been driven to bed by weariness. She would have

preferred to sit up to receive her husband, even if it had meant

sitting up all night, but her body was too heavy for her spirit. She

lay in the dark. She had eaten nothing. Gerald came straight into the

room. He struck a match, which burned blue, with a stench, for several

seconds, and then gave a clear, yellow flame. He lit a candle; and saw

his wife.

"Oh!" he said; "you're there, are you?"

She offered no reply.

"Won't speak, eh?" he said. "Agreeable sort of wife! Well, have you

made up your mind to do what I told you? I've come back especially to

know."

She still did not speak.

He sat down, with his hat on, and stuck out his feet, wagging them to

and fro on the heels.

"I'm quite without money," he went on. "And I'm sure your people will

be glad to lend us a bit till I get some. Especially as it's a question

of you starving as well as me. If I had enough to pay your fares to

Bursley I'd pack you off. But I haven't."

She could only hear his exasperating voice. The end of the bed was

between her eyes and his.

"Liar!" she said, with uncompromising distinctness. The word reached

him barbed with all the poison of her contempt and disgust.

There was a pause.

"Oh! I'm a liar, am I? Thanks. I lied enough to get you, I'll admit.

But you never complained of that. I remember be-ginning the New Year

well with a thumping lie just to have a sight of you, my vixen. But you

didn't complain then. I took you with only the clothes on your back.

And I've spent every cent I had on you. And now I'm spun, you call me a

liar."

She said nothing.

"However," he went on, "this is going to come to an end, this is!"

He rose, changed the position of the candle, putting it on a chest of

drawers, and then drew his trunk from the wall, and knelt in front of

it.

She gathered that he was packing his clothes. At first she did not

comprehend his reference to beginning the New Year. Then his meaning

revealed itself. That story to her mother about having been attacked by

ruffians at the bottom of King Street had been an invention, a ruse to

account plausibly for his presence on her mother's doorstep! And she

had never suspected that the story was not true. In spite of her

experience of his lying, she had never suspected that that particular

statement was a lie. What a simpleton she was!

There was a continual movement in the room for about a quarter of an

hour. Then a key turned in the lock of the trunk.

His head popped up over the foot of the bed. "This isn't a joke, you

know," he said.

She kept silence.

"I give you one more chance. Will you write to your mother--or

Constance if you like--or won't you?"

She scorned to reply in any way.

"I'm your husband," he said. "And it's your duty to obey me,

particularly in an affair like this. I order you to write to your

mother."

The corners of her lips turned downwards.

Angered by her mute obstinacy, he broke away from the bed with a sudden

gesture.

"You do as you like," he cried, putting on his overcoat, "and I shall

do as I like. You can't say I haven't warned you. It's your own

deliberate choice, mind you! Whatever happens to you you've brought on

yourself." He lifted and shrugged his shoulders to get the overcoat

exactly into place on his shoulders.

She would not speak a word, not even to insist that she was indisposed.

He pushed his trunk outside the door, and returned to the bed.

"You understand," he said menacingly; "I'm off."

She looked up at the foul ceiling.

"Hm!" he sniffed, bringing his reserves of pride to combat the

persistent silence that was damaging his dignity. And he went off,

sticking his head forward like a pugilist.

"Here!" she muttered. "You're forgetting this."

He turned.

She stretched her hand to the night-table and held up a red circlet.

"What is it?"

"It's the bit of paper off the cigar you bought in the Rue Montmartre

this afternoon," she answered, in a significant tone.

He hesitated, then swore violently, and bounced out of the room. He had

made her suffer, but she was almost repaid for everything by that

moment of cruel triumph. She exulted in it, and never forgot it.

Five minutes later, the gloomy menial in felt slippers and alpaca

jacket, who seemed to pass the whole of his life flitting in and out of

bedrooms like a rabbit in a warren, carried Gerald's trunk downstairs.

She recognized the peculiar tread of his slippers.

Then there was a knock at the door. The landlady entered, actuated by a

legitimate curiosity.

"Madame is suffering?" the landlady began.

Sophia refused offers of food and nursing.

"Madame knows without doubt that monsieur has gone away?"

"Has he paid the bill?" Sophia asked bluntly.

"But yes, madame, till to-morrow. Then madame has want of nothing?"

"If you will extinguish the candle," said Sophia.

He had deserted her, then!

"All this," she reflected, listening in the dark to the ceaseless

rattle of the street, "because mother and Constance wanted to see the

elephant, and I had to go into father's room! I should never have

caught sight of him from the drawing-room window!"

IV

She passed a night of physical misery, exasperated by the tireless

rattling vitality of the street. She kept saying to herself: "I'm all

alone now, and I'm going to be ill. I am ill." She saw herself dying in

Paris, and heard the expressions of facile sympathy and idle curiosity

drawn forth by the sight of the dead body of this foreign woman in a

little Paris hotel. She reached the stage, in the gradual excruciation

of her nerves, when she was obliged to concentrate her agonized mind on

an intense and painful expectancy of the next new noise, which when it

came increased her torture and decreased her strength to support it.

She went through all the interminable dilatoriness of the dawn, from

the moment when she could scarcely discern the window to the moment

when she could read the word 'Bock' on the red circlet of paper which

had tossed all night on the sea of the counterpane. She knew she would

never sleep again. She could not imagine herself asleep; and then she

was startled by a sound that seemed to clash with the rest of her

impressions. It was a knocking at the door. With a start she perceived

that she must have been asleep.

"Enter," she murmured.

There entered the menial in alpaca. His waxen face showed a morose

commiseration. He noiselessly approached the bed--he seemed to have

none of the characteristics of a man, but to be a creature infinitely

mysterious and aloof from humanity--and held out to Sophia a visiting

card in his grey hand.

It was Chirac's card.

"Monsieur asked for monsieur," said the waiter. "And then, as monsieur

had gone away he demanded to see madame. He says it is very important."

Her heart jumped, partly in vague alarm, and partly with a sense of

relief at this chance of speaking to some one whom she knew. She tried

to reflect rationally.

"What time is it?" she inquired.

"Eleven o'clock, madame."

This was surprising. The fact that it was eleven o'clock destroyed the

remains of her self-confidence. How could it be eleven o'clock, with

the dawn scarcely finished?

"He says it is very important," repeated the waiter, imperturbably and

solemnly. "Will madame see him an instant?"

Between resignation and anticipation she said: "Yes."

"It is well, madame," said the waiter, disappearing without a sound.

She sat up and managed to drag her matinee from a chair and put it

around her shoulders. Then she sank back from weakness, physical and

spiritual. She hated to receive Chirac in a bedroom, and particularly

in that bedroom. But the hotel had no public room except the

dining-room, which began to be occupied after eleven o'clock. Moreover,

she could not possibly get up. Yes, on the whole she was pleased to see

Chirac. He was almost her only acquaintance, assuredly the only being

whom she could by any stretch of meaning call a friend, in the whole of

Europe. Gerald and she had wandered to and fro, skimming always over

the real life of nations, and never penetrating into it. There was no

place for them, because they had made none. With the exception of

Chirac, whom an accident of business had thrown, into Gerald's company

years before, they had no social relations. Gerald was not a man to

make friends; he did not seem to need friends, or at any rate to feel

the want of them. But, as chance had given him Chirac, he maintained

the connection whenever they came to Paris. Sophia, of course, had not

been able to escape from the solitude imposed by existence in hotels.

Since her marriage she had never spoken to a woman in the way of

intimacy. But once or twice she had approached intimacy with Chirac,

whose wistful admiration for her always aroused into activity her

desire to charm.

Preceded by the menial, he came into the room hurriedly,

apologetically, with an air of acute anxiety. And as he saw her lying

on her back, with flushed features, her hair disarranged, and only the

grace of the silk ribbons of her matinee to mitigate the melancholy

repulsiveness of her surroundings, that anxiety seemed to deepen.

"Dear madame," he stammered, "all my excuses!" He hastened to the

bedside and kissed her hand--a little peek according to his custom.

"You are ill?"

"I have my migraine," she said. "You want Gerald?"

"Yes," he said diffidently. "He had promised----"

"He has left me," Sophia interrupted him in her weak and fatigued

voice. She closed her eyes as she uttered the words.

"Left you?" He glanced round to be sure that the waiter had retired.

"Quitted me! Abandoned me! Last night!"

"Not possible!" he breathed.

She nodded. She felt intimate with him. Like all secretive persons, she

could be suddenly expansive at times.

"It is serious?" he questioned.

"All that is most serious," she replied.

"And you ill! Ah, the wretch! Ah, the wretch! That, for example!" He

waved his hat about.

"What is it you want, Chirac?" she demanded, in a confidential tone.

"Eh, well," said Chirac. "You do not know where he has gone?"

"No. What do you want?" she insisted.

He was nervous. He fidgetted. She guessed that, though warm with

sympathy for her plight, he was preoccupied by interests and

apprehensions of his own. He did not refuse her request temporarily to

leave the astonishing matter of her situation in order to discuss the

matter of his visit.

"Eh, well! He came to me yesterday afternoon in the Rue Croissant to

borrow some money."

She understood then the object of Gerald's stroll on the previous

afternoon.

"I hope you didn't lend him any," she said.

"Eh, well! It was like this. He said he ought to have received five

thousand francs yesterday morning, but that he had had a telegram that

it would not arrive till to-day. And he had need of five hundred francs

at once. I had not five hundred francs"--he smiled sadly, as if to

insinuate that he did not handle such sums--"but I borrowed it from

the cashbox of the journal. It is necessary, absolutely, that I should

return it this morning." He spoke with increased seriousness. "Your

husband said he would take a cab and bring me the money immediately on

the arrival of the post this morning--about nine o'clock. Pardon me for

deranging you with such a----"

He stopped. She could see that he really was grieved to 'derange' her,

but that circumstances pressed.

"At my paper," he murmured, "it is not so easy as that to--in fine----!"

Gerald had genuinely been at his last francs. He had not lied when she

thought he had lied. The nakedness of his character showed now.

Instantly upon the final and definite cessation of the lawful supply of

money, he had set his wits to obtain money unlawfully. He had, in fact,

simply stolen it from Chirac, with the ornamental addition of

endangering Chirac's reputation and situation--as a sort of reward to

Chirac for the kindness! And, further, no sooner had he got hold of the

money than it had intoxicated him, and he had yielded to the first

fatuous temptation. He had no sense of responsibility, no scruple. And

as for common prudence--had he not risked permanent disgrace and even

prison for a paltry sum which he would certainly squander in two or

three days? Yes, it was indubitable that he would stop at nothing, at

nothing whatever.

"You did not know that he was coming to me?" asked Chirac, pulling his

short, silky brown beard.

"No," Sophia answered.

"But he said that you had charged him with your friendlinesses to me!"

He nodded his head once or twice, sadly but candidly accepting, in his

quality of a Latin, the plain facts of human nature--reconciling

himself to them at once.

Sophia revolted at this crowning detail of the structure of Gerald's

rascality.

"It is fortunate that I can pay you," she said.

"But----" he tried to protest.

"I have quite enough money."

She did not say this to screen Gerald, but merely from amour-propre.

She would not let Chirac think that she was the wife of a man bereft of

all honour. And so she clothed Gerald with the rag of having, at any

rate, not left her in destitution as well as in sickness. Her assertion

seemed a strange one, in view of the fact that he had abandoned her on

the previous evening--that is to say, immediately after the borrowing

from Chirac. But Chirac did not examine the statement.

"Perhaps he has the intention to send me the money. Perhaps, after all,

he is now at the offices----"

"No," said Sophia. "He is gone. Will you go downstairs and wait for me.

We will go together to Cook's office. It is English money I have."

"Cook's?" he repeated. The word now so potent had then little

significance. "But you are ill. You cannot----"

"I feel better."

She did. Or rather, she felt nothing except the power of her resolve to

remove the painful anxiety from that wistful brow. The shame of the

trick played on Chirac awakened new forces in her. She dressed in a

physical torment which, however, had no more reality than a nightmare.

She searched in a place where even an inquisitive husband would not

think of looking, and then, painfully, she descended the long stairs,

holding to the rail, which swam round and round her, carrying the whole

staircase with it. "After all," she thought, "I can't be seriously ill,

or I shouldn't have been able to get up and go out like this. I never

guessed early this morning that I could do it! I can't possibly be as

ill as I thought I was!"

And in the vestibule she encountered Chirac's face, lightening at the

sight of her, which proved to him that his deliverance was really to be

accomplished.

"Permit me----"

"I'm all right," she smiled, tottering. "Get a cab." It suddenly

occurred to her that she might quite as easily have given him the money

in English notes; he could have changed them. But she had not thought.

Her brain would not operate. She was dreaming and waking together.

He helped her into the cab.

V

In the bureau de change there was a little knot of English, people,

with naive, romantic, and honest faces, quite different from the faces

outside in the street. No corruption in those faces, but a sort of

wondering and infantile sincerity, rather out of its element and lost

in a land too unsophisticated, seeming to belong to an earlier age!

Sophia liked their tourist stare, and their plain and ugly clothes. She

longed to be back in England, longed for a moment with violence,

drowning in that desire.

The English clerk behind his brass bars took her notes, and carefully

examined them one by one. She watched him, not entirely convinced of

his reality, and thought vaguely of the detestable morning when she had

abstracted the notes from Gerald's pocket. She was filled with pity for

the simple, ignorant Sophia of those days, the Sophia who still had a

few ridiculous illusions concerning Gerald's character. Often, since,

she had been tempted to break into the money, but she had always

withstood the temptation, saying to herself that an hour of more urgent

need would come. It had come. She was proud of her firmness, of the

force of will which had enabled her to reserve the fund intact. The

clerk gave her a keen look, and then asked her how she would take the

French money. And she saw the notes falling down one after another on

to the counter as the clerk separated them with a snapping sound of the

paper.

Chirac was beside her.

"Does that make the count?" she said, having pushed towards him five

hundred-franc notes.

"I should not know how to thank you," he said, accepting the notes.

"Truly--"

His joy was unmistakably eager. He had had a shock and a fright, and he

now saw the danger past. He could return to the cashier of his

newspaper, and fling down the money with a lordly and careless air, as

if to say: "When it is a question of these English, one can always be

sure!" But first he would escort her to the hotel. She declined--she

did not know why, for he was her sole point of moral support in all

France. He insisted. She yielded. So she turned her back, with regret,

on that little English oasis in the Sahara of Paris, and staggered to

the fiacre.

And now that she had done what she had to do, she lost control of her

body, and reclined flaccid and inert. Chirac was evidently alarmed. He

did not speak, but glanced at her from time to time with eyes full of

fear. The carriage appeared to her to be swimming amid waves over great

depths. Then she was aware of a heavy weight against her shoulder; she

had slipped down upon Chirac, unconscious.

CHAPTER V

FEVER

I

Then she was lying in bed in a small room, obscure because it was

heavily curtained; the light came through the inner pair of curtains of

ecru lace, with a beautiful soft silvery quality. A man was standing by

the side of the bed--not Chirac.

"Now, madame," he said to her, with kind firmness, and speaking with a

charming exaggerated purity of the vowels. "You have the mucous fever.

I have had it myself. You will be forced to take baths, very

frequently. I must ask you to reconcile yourself to that, to be good."

She did not reply. It did not occur to her to reply. But she certainly

thought that this doctor--he was probably a doctor--was overestimating

her case. She felt better than she had felt for two days. Still, she

did not desire to move, nor was she in the least anxious as to her

surroundings. She lay quiet.

A woman in a rather coquettish deshabille watched over her with expert

skill.

Later, Sophia seemed to be revisiting the sea on whose waves the cab

had swum; but now she was under the sea, in a watery gulf, terribly

deep; and the sounds of the world came to her through the water, sudden

and strange. Hands seized her and forced her from the subaqueous grotto

where she had hidden into new alarms. And she briefly perceived that

there was a large bath by the side of the bed, and that she was being

pushed into it. The water was icy cold. After that her outlook upon

things was for a time clearer and more precise. She knew from fragments

of talk which she heard that she was put into the cold bath by her bed

every three hours, night and day, and that she remained in it for ten

minutes. Always, before the bath, she had to drink a glass of wine, and

sometimes another glass while she was in the bath. Beyond this wine,

and occasionally a cup of soup, she took nothing, had no wish to take

anything. She grew perfectly accustomed to these extraordinary habits

of life, to this merging of night and day into one monotonous and

endless repetition of the same rite amid the same circumstances on

exactly the same spot. Then followed a period during which she objected

to being constantly wakened up for this annoying immersion. And she

fought against it even in her dreams. Long days seemed to pass when she

could not be sure whether she had been put into the bath or not, when

all external phenomena were disconcertingly interwoven with matters

which she knew to be merely fanciful. And then she was overwhelmed by

the hopeless gravity of her state. She felt that her state was

desperate. She felt that she was dying. Her unhappiness was extreme,

not because she was dying, but because the veils of sense were so

puzzling, so exasperating, and because her exhausted body was so

vitiated, in every fibre, by disease. She was perfectly aware that she

was going to die. She cried aloud for a pair of scissors. She wanted to

cut off her hair, and to send part of it to Constance and part of it to

her mother, in separate packages. She insisted upon separate packages.

Nobody would give her a pair of scissors. She implored, meekly,

haughtily, furiously, but nobody would satisfy her. It seemed to her

shocking that all her hair should go with her into her coffin while

Constance and her mother had nothing by which to remember her, no

tangible souvenir of her beauty. Then she fought for the scissors. She

clutched at some one--always through those baffling veils--who was

putting her into the bath by the bedside, and fought frantically. It

appeared to her that this some one was the rather stout woman who had

supped at Sylvain's with the quarrelsome Englishman, four years ago.

She could not rid herself of this singular conceit, though she knew it

to be absurd....

A long time afterwards--it seemed like a century--she did actually and

unmistakably see the woman sitting by her bed, and the woman was crying.

"Why are you crying?" Sophia asked wonderingly.

And the other, younger, woman, who was standing at the foot of the bed,

replied:

"You do well to ask! It is you who have hurt her, in your delirium,

when you so madly demanded the scissors."

The stout woman smiled with the tears on her cheeks; but Sophia wept,

from remorse. The stout woman looked old, worn, and untidy. The other

one was much younger. Sophia did not trouble to inquire from them who

they were.

That little conversation formed a brief interlude in the delirium,

which overtook her again and distorted everything. She forgot, however,

that she was destined to die.

One day her brain cleared. She could be sure that she had gone to sleep

in the morning and not wakened till the evening. Hence she had not been

put into the bath.

"Have I had my baths?" she questioned.

It was the doctor who faced her.

"No," he said, "the baths are finished."

She knew from his face that she was out of danger. Moreover, she was

conscious of a new feeling in her body, as though the fount of physical

energy within her, long interrupted, had recommenced to flow--but very

slowly, a trickling. It was a rebirth. She was not glad, but her body

itself was glad; her body had an existence of its own.

She was now often left by herself in the bedroom. To the right of the

foot of the bed was a piano in walnut, and to the left a chimney-piece

with a large mirror. She wanted to look at herself in the mirror. But

it was a very long way off. She tried to sit up, and could not. She

hoped that one day she would be able to get as far as the mirror. She

said not a word about this to either of the two women.

Often they would sit in the bedroom and talk without ceasing. Sophia

learnt that the stout woman was named Foucault, and the other Laurence.

Sometimes Laurence would address Madame Foucault as Aimee, but usually

she was more formal. Madame Foucault always called the other Laurence.

Sophia's curiosity stirred and awoke. But she could not obtain any very

exact information as to where she was, except that the house was in the

Rue Breda, off the Rue Notre Dame de Lorette. She recollected vaguely

that the reputation of the street was sinister. It appeared that, on

the day when she had gone out with Chirac, the upper part of the Rue

Notre Dame de Lorette was closed for repairs--(this she

remembered)--and that the cabman had turned up the Rue Breda in order

to make a detour, and that it was just opposite to the house of Madame

Foucault that she had lost consciousness. Madame Foucault happened to

be getting into a cab at the moment; but she had told Chirac

nevertheless to carry Sophia into the house, and a policeman had

helped. Then, when the doctor came, it was discovered that she could

not be moved, save to a hospital, and both Madame Foucault and Laurence

were determined that no friend of Chirac's should be committed to the

horrors of a Paris hospital. Madame Foucault had suffered in one as a

patient, and Laurence had been a nurse in another....

Chirac was now away. The women talked loosely of a war.

"How kind you have been!" murmured Sophia, with humid eyes.

But they silenced her with gestures. She was not to talk. They seemed

to have nothing further to tell her. They said Chirac would be

returning perhaps soon, and that she could talk to him. Evidently they

both held Chirac in affection. They said often that he was a charming

boy.

Bit by bit Sophia comprehended the length and the seriousness of her

illness, and the immense devotion of the two women, and the terrific

disturbance of their lives, and her own debility. She saw that the

women were strongly attached to her, and she could not understand why,

as she had never done anything for them, whereas they had done

everything for her. She had not learnt that benefits rendered, not

benefits received, are the cause of such attachments.

All the time she was plotting, and gathering her strength to disobey

orders and get as far as the mirror. Her preliminary studies and her

preparations were as elaborate as those of a prisoner arranging to

escape from a fortress. The first attempt was a failure. The second

succeeded. Though she could not stand without support, she managed by

clinging to the bed to reach a chair, and to push the chair in front of

her until it approached the mirror. The enterprise was exciting and

terrific. Then she saw a face in the glass: white, incredibly

emaciated, with great, wild, staring eyes; and the shoulders were bent

as though with age. It was a painful, almost a horrible sight. It

frightened her, so that in her alarm she recoiled from it. Not

attending sufficiently to the chair, she sank to the ground. She could

not pick herself up, and she was caught there, miserably, by her

angered jailers. The vision of her face taught her more efficiently

than anything else the gravity of her adventure. As the women lifted

her inert, repentant mass into the bed, she reflected, "How queer my

life is!" It seemed to her that she ought to have been trimming hats in

the showroom instead of being in that curtained, mysterious, Parisian

interior.

II

One day Madame Foucault knocked at the door of Sophia's little room

(this ceremony of knocking was one of the indications that Sophia,

convalescent, had been reinstated in her rights as an individual), and

cried:

"Madame, one is going to leave you all alone for some time."

"Come in," said Sophia, who was sitting up in an armchair, and reading.

Madame Foucault opened the door. "One is going to leave you all alone

for some time," she repeated in a low, confidential voice, sharply

contrasting with her shriek behind the door.

Sophia nodded and smiled, and Madame Foucault also nodded and smiled.

But Madame Foucault's face quickly resumed its anxious expression.

"The servant's brother marries himself to-day, and she implored me to

accord her two days--what would you? Madame Laurence is out. And I must

go out. It is four o'clock. I shall re-enter at six o'clock striking.

Therefore ..."

"Perfectly," Sophia concurred.

She looked curiously at Madame Foucault, who was carefully made up and

arranged for the street, in a dress of yellow tussore with blue

ornaments, bright lemon-coloured gloves, a little blue bonnet, and a

little white parasol not wider when opened than her shoulders. Cheeks,

lips, and eyes were heavily charged with rouge, powder, or black. And

that too abundant waist had been most cunningly confined in a belt that

descended beneath, instead of rising above, the lower masses of the

vast torso. The general effect was worthy of the effort that must have

gone to it. Madame Foucault was not rejuvenated by her toilette, but it

almost procured her pardon for the crime of being over forty, fat,

creased, and worn out. It was one of those defeats that are a triumph.

"You are very chic," said Sophia, uttering her admiration.

"Ah!" said Madame Foucault, shrugging the shoulders of disillusion.

"Chic! What does that do?"

But she was pleased.

The front-door banged. Sophia, by herself for the first time in the

flat into which she had been carried unconscious and which she had

never since left, had the disturbing sensation of being surrounded by

mysterious rooms and mysterious things. She tried to continue reading,

but the sentences conveyed nothing to her. She rose--she could walk now

a little--and looked out of the window, through the interstices of the

pattern of the lace curtains. The window gave on the courtyard, which

was about sixteen feet below her. A low wall divided the courtyard from

that of the next house. And the windows of the two houses, only to be

distinguished by the different tints of their yellow paint, rose tier

above tier in level floors, continuing beyond Sophia's field of vision.

She pressed her face against the glass, and remembered the St. Luke's

Square of her childhood; and just as there from the showroom window she

could not even by pressing her face against the glass see the pavement,

so here she could not see the roof; the courtyard was like the bottom

of a well. There was no end to the windows; six storeys she could

count, and the sills of a seventh were the limit of her view. Every

window was heavily curtained, like her own. Some of the upper ones had

green sunblinds. Scarcely any sound! Mysteries brooded without as well

as within the flat of Madame Foucault. Sophia saw a bodiless hand

twitch at a curtain and vanish. She noticed a green bird in a tiny cage

on a sill in the next house. A woman whom she took to be the concierge

appeared in the courtyard, deposited a small plant in the track of a

ray of sunshine that lighted a corner for a couple of hours in the

afternoon, and disappeared again. Then she heard a piano--somewhere.

That was all. The feeling that secret and strange lives were being

lived behind those baffling windows, that humanity was everywhere

intimately pulsing around her, oppressed her spirit yet not quite

unpleasantly. The environment softened her glance upon the spectacle of

existence, insomuch that sadness became a voluptuous pleasure. And the

environment threw her back on herself, into a sensuous contemplation of

the fundamental fact of Sophia Scales, formerly Sophia Baines.

She turned to the room, with the marks of the bath on the floor by the

bed, and the draped piano that was never opened, and her two trunks

filling up the corner opposite the door. She had the idea of thoroughly

examining those trunks, which Chirac or somebody else must have fetched

from the hotel. At the top of one of them was her purse, tied up with

old ribbon and ostentatiously sealed! How comical these French people

were when they deemed it necessary to be serious! She emptied both

trunks, scrutinizing minutely all her goods, and thinking of the varied

occasions upon which she had obtained them. Then she carefully restored

them, her mind full of souvenirs newly awakened.

She sighed as she straightened her back. A clock struck in another

room. It seemed to invite her towards discoveries. She had been in no

other room of the flat. She knew nothing of the rest of the flat save

by sound. For neither of the other women had ever described it, nor had

it occurred to them that Sophia might care to leave her room though she

could not leave the house.

She opened her door, and glanced along the dim corridor, with which she

was familiar. She knew that the kitchen lay next to her little room,

and that next to the kitchen came the front-door. On the opposite side

of the corridor were four double-doors. She crossed to the pair of

doors facing her own little door, and quietly turned the handle, but

the doors were locked; the same with the next pair. The third pair

yielded, and she was in a large bedroom, with three windows on the

street. She saw that the second pair of doors, which she had failed to

unfasten, also opened into this room. Between the two pairs of doors

was a wide bed. In front of the central window was a large

dressing-table. To the left of the bed, half hiding the locked doors,

was a large screen. On the marble mantelpiece, reflected in a huge

mirror, that ascended to the ornate cornice, was a gilt-and-basalt

clock, with pendants to match. On the opposite side of the room from

this was a long wide couch. The floor was of polished oak, with a skin

on either side of the bed. At the foot of the bed was a small

writing-table, with a penny bottle of ink on it. A few coloured prints

and engravings--representing, for example, Louis Philippe and his

family, and people perishing on a raft--broke the tedium of the walls.

The first impression on Sophia's eye was one of sombre splendour.

Everything had the air of being richly ornamented, draped, looped,

carved, twisted, brocaded into gorgeousness. The dark crimson

bed-hangings fell from massive rosettes in majestic folds. The

counterpane was covered with lace. The window-curtains had amplitude

beyond the necessary, and they were suspended from behind fringed and

pleated valances. The green sofa and its sateen cushions were stiff

with applied embroidery. The chandelier hanging from the middle of the

ceiling, modelled to represent cupids holding festoons, was a

glittering confusion of gilt and lustres; the lustres tinkled when

Sophia stood on a certain part of the floor. The cane-seated chairs

were completely gilded. There was an effect of spaciousness. And the

situation of the bed between the two double-doors, with the three

windows in front and other pairs of doors communicating with other

rooms on either hand, produced in addition an admirable symmetry.

But Sophia, with the sharp gaze of a woman brought up in the traditions

of a modesty so proud that it scorns ostentation, quickly tested and

condemned the details of this chamber that imitated every luxury.

Nothing in it, she found, was 'good.' And in St. Luke's Square

'goodness' meant honest workmanship, permanence, the absence of

pretence. All the stuffs were cheap and showy and shabby; all the

furniture was cracked, warped, or broken. The clock showed five minutes

past twelve at five o'clock. And further, dust was everywhere, except

in those places where even the most perfunctory cleaning could not have

left it. In the obscurer pleatings of draperies it lay thick. Sophia's

lip curled, and instinctively she lifted her peignoir. One of her

mother's phrases came into her head: 'a lick and a promise.' And then

another: "If you want to leave dirt, leave it where everybody can see

it, not in the corners."

She peeped behind the screen, and all the horrible welter of a cabinet

de toilette met her gaze: a repulsive medley of foul waters, stained

vessels and cloths, brushes, sponges, powders, and pastes. Clothes were

hung up in disorder on rough nails; among them she recognized a

dressing-gown of Madame Foucault's, and, behind affairs of later date,

the dazzling scarlet cloak in which she had first seen Madame Foucault,

dilapidated now. So this was Madame Foucault's room! This was the bower

from which that elegance emerged, the filth from which had sprung the

mature blossom!

She passed from that room direct to another, of which the shutters were

closed, leaving it in twilight. This room too was a bedroom, rather

smaller than the middle one, and having only one window, but furnished

with the same dubious opulence. Dust covered it everywhere, and small

footmarks were visible in the dust on the floor. At the back was a

small door, papered to match the wall, and within this door was a

cabinet de toilette, with no light and no air; neither in the room nor

in the closet was there any sign of individual habitation. She

traversed the main bedroom again and found another bedroom to balance

the second one, but open to the full light of day, and in a state of

extreme disorder; the double-pillowed bed had not even been made:

clothes and towels draped all the furniture: shoes were about the

floor, and on a piece of string tied across the windows hung a single

white stocking, wet. At the back was a cabinet de toilette, as dark as

the other one, a vile malodorous mess of appliances whose familiar

forms loomed vague and extraordinarily sinister in the dense obscurity.

Sophia turned away with the righteous disgust of one whose preparations

for the gaze of the world are as candid and simple as those of a child.

Concealed dirt shocked her as much as it would have shocked her mother;

and as for the trickeries of the toilet table, she contemned them as

harshly as a young saint who has never been tempted contemns moral

weakness. She thought of the strange flaccid daily life of those two

women, whose hours seemed to slip unprofitably away without any result

of achievement. She had actually witnessed nothing; but since the

beginning of her convalescence her ears had heard, and she could piece

the evidences together. There was never any sound in the flat, outside

the kitchen, until noon. Then vague noises and smells would commence.

And about one o'clock Madame Foucault, disarrayed, would come to

inquire if the servant had attended to the needs of the invalid. Then

the odours of cookery would accentuate themselves; bells rang;

fragments of conversations escaped through doors ajar; occasionally a

man's voice or a heavy step; then the fragrance of coffee; sometimes

the sound of a kiss, the banging of the front door, the noise of

brushing, or of the shaking of a carpet, a little scream as at some

trifling domestic contretemps. Laurence, still in a dressing-gown,

would lounge into Sophia's room, dirty, haggard, but polite with a

curious stiff ceremony, and would drink her coffee there. This

wandering in peignoirs would continue till three o'clock, and then

Laurence might say, as if nerving herself to an unusual and immense

effort: "I must be dressed by five o'clock. I have not a moment." Often

Madame Foucault did not dress at all; on such days she would go to bed

immediately after dinner, with the remark that she didn't know what was

the matter with her, but she was exhausted. And then the servant would

retire to her seventh floor, and there would be silence until, now and

then, faint creepings were heard at midnight or after. Once or twice,

through the chinks of her door, Sophia had seen a light at two o'clock

in the morning, just before the dawn.

Yet these were the women who had saved her life, who between them had

put her into a cold bath every three hours night and day for weeks!

Surely it was impossible after that to despise them for shiftlessness

and talkative idling in peignoirs; impossible to despise them for

anything whatever! But Sophia, conscious of her inheritance of strong

and resolute character, did despise them as poor things. The one point

on which she envied them was their formal manners to her, which seemed

to become more dignified and graciously distant as her health improved.

It was always 'Madame,' 'Madame,' to her, with an intonation of

increasing deference. They might have been apologizing to her for

themselves.

She prowled into all the corners of the flat; but she discovered no

more rooms, nothing but a large cupboard crammed with Madame Foucault's

dresses. Then she went back to the large bedroom, and enjoyed the busy

movement and rattle of the sloping street, and had long, vague

yearnings for strength and for freedom in wide, sane places. She

decided that on the morrow she would dress herself 'properly,' and

never again wear a peignoir; the peignoir and all that it represented,

disgusted her. And while looking at the street she ceased to see it and

saw Cook's office and Chirac helping her into the carriage. Where was

he? Why had he brought her to this impossible abode? What did he mean

by such conduct? But could he have acted otherwise? He had done the one

thing that he could do.... Chance! ... Chance! And why an impossible

abode? Was one place more impossible than another? All this came of

running away from home with Gerald. It was remarkable that she seldom

thought of Gerald. He had vanished from her life as he had come into

it--madly, preposterously. She wondered what the next stage in her

career would be. She certainly could not forecast it. Perhaps Gerald

was starving, or in prison ... Bah! That exclamation expressed her

appalling disdain of Gerald and of the Sophia who had once deemed him

the paragon of men. Bah!

A carriage stopping in front of the house awakened her from her

meditation. Madame Foucault and a man very much younger than Madame

Foucault got out of it. Sophia fled. After all, this prying into other

people's rooms was quite inexcusable. She dropped on to her own bed and

picked up a book, in case Madame Foucault should come in.

III

In the evening, just after night had fallen, Sophia on the bed heard

the sound of raised and acrimonious voices in Madame Foucault's room.

Nothing except dinner had happened since the arrival of Madame Foucault

and the young man. These two had evidently dined informally in the

bedroom on a dish or so prepared by Madame Foucault, who had herself

served Sophia with her invalid's repast. The odours of cookery still

hung in the air.

The noise of virulent discussion increased and continued, and then

Sophia could hear sobbing, broken by short and fierce phrases from the

man. Then the door of the bedroom opened brusquely. "J'en ai soupe!"

exclaimed the man, in tones of angry disgust. "Laisse-moi, je te prie!"

And then a soft muffled sound, as of a struggle, a quick step, and the

very violent banging of the front door. After that there was a

noticeable silence, save for the regular sobbing. Sophia wondered when

it would cease, that monotonous sobbing.

"What is the matter?" she called out from her bed.

The sobbing grew louder, like the sobbing of a child who has detected

an awakening of sympathy and instinctively begins to practise upon it.

In the end Sophia arose and put on the peignoir which she had almost

determined never to wear again. The broad corridor was lighted by a

small, smelling oil-lamp with a crimson globe. That soft, transforming

radiance seemed to paint the whole corridor with voluptuous luxury: so

much so that it was impossible to believe that the smell came from the

lamp. Under the lamp lay Madame Foucault on the floor, a shapeless mass

of lace, frilled linen, and corset; her light brown hair was loose and

spread about the floor. At the first glance, the creature abandoned to

grief made a romantic and striking picture, and Sophia thought for an

instant that she had at length encountered life on a plane that would

correspond to her dreams of romance. And she was impressed, with a

feeling somewhat akin to that of a middling commoner when confronted

with a viscount. There was, in the distance, something imposing and

sensational about that prone, trembling figure. The tragic works of

love were therein apparently manifest, in a sort of dignified beauty.

But when Sophia bent over Madame Foucault, and touched her flabbiness,

this illusion at once vanished; and instead of being dramatically

pathetic the woman was ridiculous. Her face, especially as damaged by

tears, could not support the ordeal of inspection; it was horrible; not

a picture, but a palette; or like the coloured design of a pavement

artist after a heavy shower. Her great, relaxed eyelids alone would

have rendered any face absurd; and there were monstrous details far

worse than the eyelids. Then she was amazingly fat; her flesh seemed to

be escaping at all ends from a corset strained to the utmost limit. And

above her boots--she was still wearing dainty, high-heeled, tightly

laced boots--the calves bulged suddenly out.

As a woman of between forty and fifty, the obese sepulchre of a dead

vulgar beauty, she had no right to passions and tears and homage, or

even the means of life; she had no right to expose herself

picturesquely beneath a crimson glow in all the panoply of ribboned

garters and lacy seductiveness. It was silly; it was disgraceful. She

ought to have known that only youth and slimness have the right to

appeal to the feelings by indecent abandonments.

Such were the thoughts that mingled with the sympathy of the beautiful

and slim Sophia as she bent down to Madame Foucault. She was sorry for

her landlady, but at the same time she despised her, and resented her

woe.

"What is the matter?" she asked quietly.

"He has chucked me!" stammered Madame Foucault. "And he's the last. I

have no one now!"

She rolled over in the most grotesque manner, kicking up her legs, with

a fresh outburst of sobs. Sophia felt quite ashamed for her.

"Come and lie down. Come now!" she said, with a touch of sharpness.

"You musn't lie there like that."

Madame Foucault's behaviour was really too outrageous. Sophia helped

her, morally rather than physically, to rise, and then persuaded her

into the large bedroom. Madame Foucault fell on the bed, of which the

counterpane had been thrown over the foot. Sophia covered the lower

part of her heaving body with the counterpane.

"Now, calm yourself, please!"

This room too was lit in crimson, by a small lamp that stood on the

night-table, and though the shade of the lamp was cracked, the general

effect of the great chamber was incontestably romantic. Only the

pillows of the wide bed and a small semi-circle of floor were

illuminated, all the rest lay in shadow. Madame Foucault's head had

dropped between the pillows. A tray containing dirty plates and glasses

and a wine-bottle was speciously picturesque on the writing-table.

Despite her genuine gratitude to Madame Foucault for astounding care

during her illness, Sophia did not like her landlady, and the present

scene made her coldly wrathful. She saw the probability of having

another's troubles piled on the top of her own. She did not, in her

mind, actively object, because she felt that she could not be more

hopelessly miserable than she was; but she passively resented the

imposition. Her reason told her that she ought to sympathize with this

ageing, ugly, disagreeable, undignified woman; but her heart was

reluctant; her heart did not want to know anything at all about Madame

Foucault, nor to enter in any way into her private life.

"I have not a single friend now," stammered Madame Foucault.

"Oh, yes, you have," said Sophia, cheerfully. "You have Madame

Laurence."

"Laurence--that is not a friend. You know what I mean."

"And me! I am your friend!" said Sophia, in obedience to her conscience.

"You are very kind," replied Madame Foucault, from the pillow. "But you

know what I mean."

The fact was that Sophia did know what she meant. The terms of their

intercourse had been suddenly changed. There was no pretentious

ceremony now, but the sincerity that disaster brings. The vast

structure of make-believe, which between them they had gradually built,

had crumbled to nothing.

"I never treated badly any man in my life," whimpered Madame Foucault.

"I have always been a--good girl. There is not a man who can say I have

not been a good girl. Never was I a girl like the rest. And every one

has said so. Ah! when I tell you that once I had a hotel in the Avenue

de la Reine Hortense. Four horses ... I have sold a horse to Madame

Musard.... You know Madame Musard.... But one cannot make economies.

Impossible to make economies! Ah! In 'fifty-six I was spending a

hundred thousand francs a year. That cannot last. Always I have said to

myself: 'That cannot last.' Always I had the intention.... But what

would you? I installed myself here, and borrowed money to pay for the

furniture. There did not remain to me one jewel. The men are poltroons,

all! I could let three bedrooms for three hundred and fifty francs a

month, and with serving meals and so on I could live."

"Then that," Sophia interrupted, pointing to her own bedroom across the

corridor, "is your room?"

"Yes," said Madame Foucault. "I put you in it because at the moment all

these were let. They are so no longer. Only one--Laurence--and she does

not pay me always. What would you? Tenants--that does not find itself

at the present hour.... I have nothing, and I owe. And he quits me. He

chooses this moment to quit me! And why? For nothing. For nothing. That

is not for his money that I regret him. No, no! You know, at his

age--he is twenty-five--and with a woman like me--one is not generous!

No. I loved him. And then a man is a moral support, always. I loved

him. It is at my age, mine, that one knows how to love. Beauty goes

always, but not the temperament! Ah, that--No! ... I loved him. I love

him."

Sophia's face tingled with a sudden emotion caused by the repetition of

those last three words, whose spell no usage can mar. But she said

nothing.

"Do you know what I shall become? There is nothing but that for me. And

I know of such, who are there already. A charwoman! Yes, a charwoman!

More soon or more late. Well, that is life. What would you? One exists

always." Then in a different tone: "I demand your pardon, madame, for

talking like this. I ought to have shame."

And Sophia felt that in listening she also ought to be ashamed. But she

was not ashamed. Everything seemed very natural, and even ordinary.

And, moreover, Sophia was full of the sense of her superiority over the

woman on the bed. Four years ago, in the Restaurant Sylvain, the

ingenuous and ignorant Sophia had shyly sat in awe of the resplendent

courtesan, with her haughty stare, her large, easy gestures, and her

imperturbable contempt for the man who was paying. And now Sophia knew

that she, Sophia, knew all that was to be known about human nature. She

had not merely youth, beauty, and virtue, but knowledge--knowledge

enough to reconcile her to her own misery. She had a vigorous, clear

mind, and a clean conscience. She could look any one in the face, and

judge every one too as a woman of the world. Whereas this obscene wreck

on the bed had nothing whatever left. She had not merely lost her

effulgent beauty, she had become repulsive. She could never have had

any commonsense, nor any force of character. Her haughtiness in the day

of glory was simply fatuous, based on stupidity. She had passed the

years in idleness, trailing about all day in stuffy rooms, and emerging

at night to impress nincompoops; continually meaning to do things which

she never did, continually surprised at the lateness of the hour,

continually occupied with the most foolish trifles. And here she was at

over forty writhing about on the bare floor because a boy of

twenty-five (who MUST be a worthless idiot) had abandoned her after a

scene of ridiculous shoutings and stampings. She was dependent on the

caprices of a young scamp, the last donkey to turn from her with

loathing! Sophia thought: "Goodness! If I had been in her place I

shouldn't have been like that. I should have been rich. I should have

saved like a miser. I wouldn't have been dependent on anybody at that

age. If I couldn't have made a better courtesan than this pitiable

woman, I would have drowned myself."

In the harsh vanity of her conscious capableness and young strength she

thought thus, half forgetting her own follies, and half excusing them

on the ground of inexperience.

Sophia wanted to go round the flat and destroy every crimson lampshade

in it. She wanted to shake Madame Foucault into self-respect and

sagacity. Moral reprehension, though present in her mind, was only

faint. Certainly she felt the immense gulf between the honest woman and

the wanton, but she did not feel it as she would have expected to feel

it. "What a fool you have been!" she thought; not: "What a sinner!"

With her precocious cynicism, which was somewhat unsuited to the lovely

northern youthfulness of that face, she said to herself that the whole

situation and their relative attitudes would have been different if

only Madame Foucault had had the wit to amass a fortune, as (according

to Gerald) some of her rivals had succeeded in doing.

And all the time she was thinking, in another part of her mind: "I

ought not to be here. It's no use arguing. I ought not to be here.

Chirac did the only thing for me there was to do. But I must go now."

Madame Foucault continued to recite her woes, chiefly financial, in a

weak voice damp with tears; she also continued to apologize for

mentioning herself. She had finished sobbing, and lay looking at the

wall, away from Sophia, who stood irresolute near the bed, ashamed for

her companion's weakness and incapacity.

"You must not forget," said Sophia, irritated by the unrelieved

darkness of the picture drawn by Madame Foucault, "that at least I owe

you a considerable sum, and that I am only waiting for you to tell me

how much it is. I have asked you twice already, I think."

"Oh, you are still suffering!" said Madame Foucault.

"I am quite well enough to pay my debts," said Sophia.

"I do not like to accept money from you," said Madame Foucault.

"But why not?"

"You will have the doctor to pay."

"Please do not talk in that way," said Sophia. "I have money, and I can

pay for everything, and I shall pay for everything."

She was annoyed because she was sure that Madame Foucault was only

making a pretence of delicacy, and that in any case her delicacy was

preposterous. Sophia had remarked this on the two previous occasions

when she had mentioned the subject of bills. Madame Foucault would not

treat her as an ordinary lodger, now that the illness was past. She

wanted, as it were, to complete brilliantly what she had begun, and to

live in Sophia's memory as a unique figure of lavish philanthropy. This

was a sentiment, a luxury that she desired to offer herself: the

thought that she had played providence to a respectable married lady in

distress; she frequently hinted at Sophia's misfortunes and

helplessness. But she could not afford the luxury. She gazed at it as a

poor woman gazes at costly stuffs through the glass of a shop-window.

The truth was, she wanted the luxury for nothing. For a double reason

Sophia was exasperated: by Madame Foucault's absurd desire, and by a

natural objection to the role of a subject for philanthropy. She would

not admit that Madame Foucault's devotion as a nurse entitled her to

the satisfaction of being a philanthropist when there was no necessity

for philanthropy.

"How long have I been here?" asked Sophia.

"I don't know." murmured Madame Foucault. "Eight weeks--or is it nine?"

"Suppose we say nine," said Sophia.

"Very well," agreed Madame Foucault, apparently reluctant.

"Now, how much must I pay you per week?"

"I don't want anything--I don't want anything! You are a friend of

Chirac's. You----"

"Not at all!" Sophia interrupted, tapping her foot and biting her lip.

"Naturally I must pay."

Madame Foucault wept quietly.

"Shall I pay you seventy-five francs a week?" said Sophia, anxious to

end the matter.

"It is too much!" Madame Foucault protested, insincerely.

"What? For all you have done for me?"

"I speak not of that," Madame Foucault modestly replied.

If the devotion was not to be paid for, then seventy-five francs a week

was assuredly too much, as during more than half the time Sophia had

had almost no food. Madame Foucault was therefore within the truth when

she again protested, at sight of the bank-notes which Sophia brought

from her trunk:

"I am sure that it is too much."

"Not at all!" Sophia repeated. "Nine weeks at seventy-five. That makes

six hundred and seventy-five. Here are seven hundreds."

"I have no change," said Madame Foucault. "I have nothing."

"That will pay for the hire of the bath," said Sophia.

She laid the notes on the pillow. Madame Foucault looked at them

gluttonously, as any other person would have done in her place. She did

not touch them. After an instant she burst into wild tears.

"But why do you cry?" Sophia asked, softened.

"I--I don't know!" spluttered Madame Foucault. "You are so beautiful. I

am so content that we saved you." Her great wet eyes rested on Sophia.

It was sentimentality. Sophia ruthlessly set it down as sentimentality.

But she was touched. She was suddenly moved. Those women, such as they

were in their foolishness, probably had saved her life--and she a

stranger! Flaccid as they were, they had been capable of resolute

perseverance there. It was possible to say that chance had thrown them

upon an enterprise which they could not have abandoned till they or

death had won. It was possible to say that they hoped vaguely to derive

advantage from their labours. But even then? Judged by an ordinary

standard, those women had been angels of mercy. And Sophia was

despising them, cruelly taking their motives to pieces, accusing them

of incapacity when she herself stood a supreme proof of their capacity

in, at any rate, one direction! In a rush of emotion she saw her

hardness and her injustice.

She bent down. "Never can I forget how kind you have been to me. It is

incredible! Incredible!" She spoke softly, in tones loaded with genuine

feeling. It was all she said. She could not embroider on the theme. She

had no talent for thanksgiving.

Madame Foucault made the beginning of a gesture, as if she meant to

kiss Sophia with those thick, marred lips; but refrained. Her head sank

back, and then she had a recurrence of the fit of nervous sobbing.

Immediately afterwards there was the sound of a latchkey in the

front-door of the flat; the bedroom door was open. Still sobbing very

violently, she cocked her ear, and pushed the bank-notes under the

pillow.

Madame Laurence--as she was called: Sophia had never heard her

surname--came straight into the bedroom, and beheld the scene with

astonishment in her dark twinkling eyes. She was usually dressed in

black, because people said that black suited her, and because black was

never out of fashion; black was an expression of her idiosyncrasy. She

showed a certain elegance, and by comparison with the extreme disorder

of Madame Foucault and the deshabille of Sophia her appearance, all

fresh from a modish restaurant, was brilliant; it gave her an advantage

over the other two--that moral advantage which ceremonial raiment

always gives.

"What is it that passes?" she demanded.

"He has chucked me, Laurence!" exclaimed Madame Foucault, in a sort of

hysteric scream which seemed to force its way through her sobs. From

the extraordinary freshness of Madame Foucault's woe, it might have

been supposed that her young man had only that instant strode out.

Laurence and Sophia exchanged a swift glance; and Laurence, of course,

perceived that Sophia's relations with her landlady and nurse were now

of a different, a more candid order. She indicated her perception of

the change by a single slight movement of the eyebrows.

"But listen, Aimee," she said authoritatively. "You must not let

yourself go like that. He will return."

"Never!" cried Madame Foucault. "It is finished. And he is the last!"

Laurence, ignoring Madame Foucault, approached Sophia. "You have an air

very fatigued," she said, caressing Sophia's shoulder with her gloved

hand. "You are pale like everything. All this is not for you. It is not

reasonable to remain here, you still suffering! At this hour! Truly not

reasonable!"

Her hands persuaded Sophia towards the corridor. And, in fact, Sophia

did then notice her own exhaustion. She departed from the room with the

ready obedience of physical weakness, and shut her door.

After about half an hour, during which she heard confused noises and

murmurings, her door half opened.

"May I enter, since you are not asleep?" It was Laurence's voice.

Twice, now, she had addressed Sophia without adding the formal 'madame.'

"Enter, I beg you," Sophia called from the bed. "I am reading."

Laurence came in. Sophia was both glad and sorry to see her. She was

eager to hear gossip which, however, she felt she ought to despise.

Moreover, she knew that if they talked that night they would talk as

friends, and that Laurence would ever afterwards treat her with the

familiarity of a friend. This she dreaded. Still, she knew that she

would yield, at any rate, to the temptation to listen to gossip.

"I have put her to bed," said Laurence, in a whisper, as she cautiously

closed the door. "The poor woman! Oh, what a charming bracelet! It is a

true pearl, naturally?"

Her roving eye had immediately, with an infallible instinct, caught

sight of a bracelet which, in taking stock of her possessions, Sophia

had accidentally left on the piano. She picked it up, and then put it

down again.

"Yes," said Sophia. She was about to add: "It's nearly all the

jewellery I possess;" but she stopped.

Laurence moved towards Sophia's bed, and stood over it as she had often

done in her quality as nurse. She had taken off her gloves, and she

made a piquant, pretty show, with her thirty years, and her agreeable,

slightly roguish face, in which were mingled the knowingness of a

street boy and the confidence of a woman who has ceased to be surprised

at the influence of her snub nose on a highly intelligent man.

"Did she tell you what they had quarrelled about?" Laurence inquired

abruptly. And not only the phrasing of the question, but the assured

tone in which it was uttered, showed that Laurence meant to be the

familiar of Sophia.

"Not a word!" said Sophia.

In this brief question and reply, all was crudely implied that had

previously been supposed not to exist. The relations between the two

women were altered irretrievably in a moment.

"It must have been her fault!" said Laurence. "With men she is

insupportable. I have never understood how that poor woman has made her

way. With women she is charming. But she seems to be incapable of not

treating men like dogs. Some men adore that, but they are few. Is it

not?"

Sophia smiled.

"I have told her! How many times have I told her! But it is useless. It

is stronger than she is, and if she finishes on straw one will be able

to say that it was because of that. But truly she ought not to have

asked him here! Truly that was too much! If he knew...!"

"Why not?" asked Sophia, awkwardly. The answer startled her.

"Because her room has not been disinfected."

"But I thought all the flat had been disinfected?"

"All except her room."

"But why not her room?"

Laurence shrugged her shoulders. "She did not want to disturb her

things! Is it that I know, I? She is like that. She takes an idea--and

then, there you are!"

"She told me every room had been disinfected."

"She told the same to the police and the doctor."

"Then all the disinfection is useless?"

"Perfectly! But she is like that. This flat might be very remunerative;

but with her, never! She has not even paid for the furniture--after two

years!"

"But what will become of her?" Sophia asked.

"Ah--that!" Another shrug of the shoulders. "All that I know is that it

will be necessary for me to leave here. The last time I brought

Monsieur Cerf here, she was excessively rude to him. She has doubtless

told you about Monsieur Cerf?"

"No. Who is Monsieur Cerf?"

"Ah! She has not told you? That astonishes me. Monsieur Cerf, that is

my friend, you know."

"Oh!" murmured Sophia.

"Yes," Laurence proceeded, impelled by a desire to impress Sophia and

to gossip at large. "That is my friend. I knew him at the hospital. It

was to please him that I left the hospital. After that we quarrelled

for two years; but at the end he gave me right. I did not budge. Two

years! It is long. And I had left the hospital. I could have gone back.

But I would not. That is not a life, to be nurse in a Paris hospital!

No, I drew myself out as well as I could ... He is the most charming

boy you can imagine! And rich now; that is to say, relatively. He has a

cousin infinitely more rich than he. I dined with them both to-night at

the Maison Doree. For a luxurious boy, he is a luxurious boy--the

cousin I mean. It appears that he has made a fortune in Canada."

"Truly!" said Sophia, with politeness. Laurence's hand was playing on

the edge of the bed, and Sophia observed for the first time that it

bore a wedding-ring.

"You remark my ring?" Laurence laughed. "That is he--the cousin.

'What!' he said, 'you do not wear an alliance? An alliance is more

proper. We are going to arrange that after dinner.' I said that all the

jewellers' shops would be closed. 'That is all the same to me,' he

said. 'We will open one.' And in effect ... it passed like that. He

succeeded! Is it not beautiful?" She held forth her hand.

"Yes," said Sophia. "It is very beautiful."

"Yours also is beautiful," said Laurence, with an extremely puzzling

intonation.

"It is just the ordinary English wedding-ring," said Sophia. In spite

of herself she blushed.

"Now I have married you. It is I, the cure, said he--the cousin--when

he put the ring on my finger. Oh, he is excessively amusing! He pleases

me much. And he is all alone. He asked me whether I knew among my

friends a sympathetic, pretty girl, to make four with us three for a

picnic. I said I was not sure, but I thought not. Whom do I know?

Nobody. I'm not a woman like the rest. I am always discreet. I do not

like casual relations.... But he is very well, the cousin. Brown

eyes.... It is an idea--will you come, one day? He speaks English. He

loves the English. He is all that is most correct, the perfect

gentleman. He would arrange a dazzling fete. I am sure he would be

enchanted to make your acquaintance. Enchanted! ... As for my Charles,

happily he is completely mad about me--otherwise I should have fear."

She smiled, and in her smile was a genuine respect for Sophia's face.

"I fear I cannot come," said Sophia. She honestly endeavoured to keep

out of her reply any accent of moral superiority, but she did not quite

succeed. She was not at all horrified by Laurence's suggestion. She

meant simply to refuse it; but she could not do so in a natural voice.

"It is true you are not yet strong enough," said the imperturbable

Laurence, quickly, and with a perfect imitation of naturalness. "But

soon you must make a little promenade." She stared at her ring. "After

all, it is more proper," she observed judicially. "With a wedding-ring

one is less likely to be annoyed. What is curious is that the idea

never before came to me. Yet ..."

"You like jewellery?" said Sophia.

"If I like jewellery!" with a gesture of the hands.

"Will you pass me that bracelet?"

Laurence obeyed, and Sophia clasped it round the girl's wrist.

"Keep it," Sophia said.

"For me?" Laurence exclaimed, ravished. "It is too much."

"It is not enough," said Sophia. "And when you look at it, you must

remember how kind you were to me, and how grateful I am."

"How nicely you say that!" Laurence said ecstatically.

And Sophia felt that she had indeed said it rather nicely. This giving

of the bracelet, souvenir of one of the few capricious follies that

Gerald had committed for her and not for himself, pleased Sophia very

much.

"I am afraid your nursing of me forced you to neglect Monsieur Cerf,"

she added.

"Yes, a little!" said Laurence, impartially, with a small pout of

haughtiness. "It is true that he used to complain. But I soon put him

straight. What an idea! He knows there are things upon which I do not

joke. It is not he who will quarrel a second time! Believe me!"

Laurence's absolute conviction of her power was what impressed Sophia.

To Sophia she seemed to be a vulgar little piece of goods, with dubious

charm and a glance that was far too brazen. Her movements were vulgar.

And Sophia wondered how she had established her empire and upon what it

rested.

"I shall not show this to Aimee," whispered Laurence, indicating the

bracelet.

"As you wish," said Sophia.

"By the way, have I told you that war is declared?" Laurence casually

remarked.

"No," said Sophia. "What war?"

"The scene with Aimee made me forget it ... With Germany. The city is

quite excited. An immense crowd in front of the new Opera. They say we

shall be at Berlin in a month--or at most two months."

"Oh!" Sophia muttered. "Why is there a war?"

"Ah! It is I who asked that. Nobody knows. It is those Prussians."

"Don't you think we ought to begin again with the disinfecting?" Sophia

asked anxiously. "I must speak to Madame Foucault."

Laurence told her not to worry, and went off to show the bracelet to

Madame Foucault. She had privately decided that this was a pleasure

which, after all, she could not deny herself.

IV

About a fortnight later--it was a fine Saturday in early

August--Sophia, with a large pinafore over her dress, was finishing the

portentous preparations for disinfecting the flat. Part of the affair

was already accomplished, her own room and the corridor having been

fumigated on the previous day, in spite of the opposition of Madame

Foucault, who had taken amiss Laurence's tale-bearing to Sophia.

Laurence had left the flat--under exactly what circumstances Sophia

knew not, but she guessed that it must have been in consequence of a

scene elaborating the tiff caused by Madame Foucault's resentment

against Laurence. The brief, factitious friendliness between Laurence

and Sophia had gone like a dream, and Laurence had gone like a dream.

The servant had been dismissed; in her place Madame Foucault employed a

charwoman each morning for two hours. Finally, Madame Foucault had been

suddenly called away that morning by a letter to her sick father at St.

Mammes-sur-Seine. Sophia was delighted at the chance. The disinfecting

of the flat had become an obsession with Sophia--the obsession of a

convalescent whose perspective unconsciously twists things to the most

wry shapes. She had had trouble on the day before with Madame Foucault,

and she was expecting more serious trouble when the moment arrived for

ejecting Madame Foucault as well as all her movable belongings from

Madame Foucault's own room. Nevertheless, Sophia had been determined,

whatever should happen, to complete an honest fumigation of the entire

flat. Hence the eagerness with which, urging Madame Foucault to go to

her father, Sophia had protested that she was perfectly strong and

could manage by herself for a couple of days. Owing to the partial

suppression of the ordinary railway services in favour of military

needs, Madame Foucault could not hope to go and return on the same day.

Sophia had lent her a louis.

Pans of sulphur were mysteriously burning in each of the three front

rooms, and two pairs of doors had been pasted over with paper, to

prevent the fumes from escaping. The charwoman had departed. Sophia,

with brush, scissors, flour-paste, and news-sheets, was sealing the

third pair of doors, when there was a ring at the front door.

She had only to cross the corridor in order to open.

It was Chirac. She was not surprised to see him. The outbreak of the

war had induced even Sophia and her landlady to look through at least

one newspaper during the day, and she had in this way learnt, from an

article signed by Chirac, that he had returned to Paris after a mission

into the Vosges country for his paper.

He started on seeing her. "Ah!" He breathed out the exclamation slowly.

And then smiled, seized her hand, and kissed it.

The sight of his obvious extreme pleasure in meeting her again was the

sweetest experience that had fallen to Sophia for years.

"Then you are cured?"

"Quite."

He sighed. "You know, this is an enormous relief to me, to know,

veritably, that you are no longer in danger. You gave me a fright ...

but a fright, my dear madame!"

She smiled in silence.

As he glanced inquiringly up and down the corridor, she said--

"I'm all alone in the flat. I'm disinfecting it."

"Then that is sulphur that I smell?"

She nodded. "Excuse me while I finish this door," she said.

He closed the front-door. "But you seem to be quite at home here!" he

observed.

"I ought to be," said she.

He glanced again inquiringly up and down the corridor. "And you are

really all alone now?" he asked, as though to be doubly sure.

She explained the circumstances.

"I owe you my most sincere excuses for bringing you here," he said

confidentially.

"But why?" she replied, looking intently at her door. "They have been

most kind to me. Nobody could have been kinder. And Madame Laurence

being such a good nurse----"

"It is true," said he. "That was a reason. In effect they are both very

good-natured little women.... You comprehend, as journalist it arrives

to me to know all kinds of people ..." He snapped his fingers ... "And

as we were opposite the house. In fine, I pray you to excuse me."

"Hold me this paper," she said. "It is necessary that every crack

should be covered; also between the floor and the door."

"You English are wonderful," he murmured, as he took the paper.

"Imagine you doing that! Then," he added, resuming the confidential

tone, "I suppose you will leave the Foucault now, hein?"

"I suppose so," she said carelessly.

"You go to England?"

She turned to him, as she patted the creases out of a strip of paper

with a duster, and shook her head.

"Not to England?"

"No."

"If it is not indiscreet, where are you going?"

"I don't know," she said candidly.

And she did not know. She was without a plan. Her brain told her that

she ought to return to Bursley, or, at the least, write. But her pride

would not hear of such a surrender. Her situation would have to be far

more desperate than it was before she could confess her defeat to her

family even in a letter. A thousand times no! That was a point which

she had for ever decided. She would face any disaster, and any other

shame, rather than the shame of her family's forgiving reception of her.

"And you?" she asked. "How does it go? This war?"

He told her, in a few words, a few leading facts about himself. "It

must not be said," he added of the war, "but that will turn out ill!

I--I know, you comprehend."

"Truly?" she answered with casualness.

"You have heard nothing of him?" Chirac asked.

"Who? Gerald?"

He gave a gesture.

"Nothing! Not a word! Nothing!"

"He will have gone back to England!"

"Never!" she said positively.

"But why not?"

"Because he prefers France. He really does like France. I think it is

the only real passion he ever had."

"It is astonishing," reflected Chirac, "how France is loved! And

yet...! But to live, what will he do? Must live!"

Sophia merely shrugged her shoulders.

"Then it is finished between you two?" he muttered awkwardly.

She nodded. She was on her knees, at the lower crack of the doors.

"There!" she said, rising. "It's well done, isn't it? That is all."

She smiled at him, facing him squarely, in the obscurity of the untidy

and shabby corridor. Both felt that they had become very intimate. He

was intensely flattered by her attitude, and she knew it.

"Now," she said, "I will take off my pinafore. Where can I niche you?

There is only my bedroom, and I want that. What are we to do?"

"Listen," he suggested diffidently. "Will you do me the honour to come

for a drive? That will do you good. There is sunshine. And you are

always very pale."

"With pleasure," she agreed cordially.