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 shopwindow. 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 banknotes 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 banknotes 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, Aimée,” 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,
