"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.