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.