“Sneak!  Spying little cat!  How dare you pry into my letters?”

“But, Mama Therese—!”

“Be still, you!  Has one asked you to speak?  Give me those others”—­Mama Therese with a vast show of violence appropriated them from Sofia’s unresisting grasp—­“and after this keep your nose of a mouchard out of what doesn’t concern you!”

“But, Mama Therese!—­”

“Hold your tongue.  I wish to hear nothing from you, I hear too much—­yes, and see too much, too!  Oh, don’t flatter yourself I am like that fat dolt of a Dupont, to be taken in by a pair of round eyes and innocent ways.  I know your sort, I know you, mam’selle, too well!  Me, I am nobody’s fool, least of all yours, young woman.  What goes on under my nose, I see; and if you imagine otherwise you are a bigger simpleton that you take me for.”

She snapped her fingers viciously in Sofia’s crimsoned face, uttered a contemptuous “Zut!” and waddled off, shaking her head and growling to herself.

Sofia felt stunned.  The offensive had been launched so swiftly, she was conscious of having done so little to invite it, she had been taken unprepared, thrown into confusion, her feeble objections silenced and overwhelmed by that deluge of abuse, publicly disgraced....

Her face was burning, and tears started in her eyes; but she winked them back, she would not let them fall.  Conscious of the grins of the handful of patrons, and the leers of the waiters, she steeled herself to suppress every betrayal of the mortification in which her soul was writhing, she made no sign but stared on stonily at the blackness of the night that peered in at the open doors.

Then indignation came to her rescue, the flaming colour ebbed from her face and left it unnaturally white, the mists before her eyes dissipated and their look grew fixed and hard, even her lips took on a grim, unyielding set.  Beneath the desk her hands clenched into small fists.  But she did not move.

The sensation stirred up by the outbreak of Mama Therese subsided, the domino players resumed their game, the old gentleman reading Le Rire turned a page and read on with a knowing smile, lovers returned to their low-voiced love-making, waiters yawned behind their hands, all was as it had been save that, at their table (Sofia could see by the mirror, without looking directly) Mama Therese and Papa Dupont seemed to have declared an armistice and were gobbling down the rest of their meal in silence and indecorous haste.

Presently they got up and sought their living quarters.  To do this they had to pass the caisse and through the green baize door.  Mama Therese marched ahead with forbidding frown and quivering chins, with the militant carriage of misprized and affronted rectitude.  To her, it was obvious, Sofia for the time being did not exist.  At her heels Papa Dupont shambled uneasily, hanging the head of deep thoughtfulness, avoiding Sofia’s gaze.  It was his part to pretend that all was well and always would be; only he lacked the effrontery, just then, for his usual smirk.