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