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.