The two women lunched, mainly on macaroni, with some cheese and an apple.  Christine had coffee.  Ah, she must always have her coffee.  As for a cigarette, she never smoked when alone, because she did not really care for smoking.  Marthe, however, enjoyed smoking, and Christine gave her a cigarette, which she lighted while clearing the table.  One was mistress, the other servant, but the two women were constantly meeting on the plane of equality.  Neither of them could avoid it, or consistently tried to avoid it.  Although Marthe did not eat with Christine, if a meal was in progress she generally came into the sitting-room with her mouth more or less full of food.  Their repasts were trifles, passovers, unceremonious and irregular peckings, begun and finished in a few moments.  And if Marthe was always untidy in her person, Christine, up till three in the afternoon, was also untidy.  They went about the flat in a wonderful state of unkempt and insecure slovenliness.  And sometimes Marthe might be lolling in the sitting-room over the illustrations in La Vie Parisienne, which was part of the apparatus of the flat, while Christine was in the tiny kitchen washing gloves as she alone could wash them.

The flat lapsed into at any rate a superficial calm.  Marthe, seeing that fate had deprived her of the usual consolations of religion, determined to reward herself by remaining a perfect slattern for the rest of the day.  She would not change at all.  She would not wash up either the breakfast things or the lunch things.  Leaving a small ring of gas alight in the gas stove, she sat down all dirty on a hard chair in front of it and fell into a luxurious catalepsy.  In the sitting-room Christine sat upright on the sofa and read lusciously a French translation of East Lynne.  She was in no hurry for the man to waken; her sense of time was very imperfect; she was never pricked by the thought that life is short and that many urgent things demand to be done before the grave opens.  Nor was she apprehensive of unpleasant complications.  The man was in the flat, but it was her flat; her law ran in the flat; and the door was fast against invasion.  Still, the gentle snore of the man, rising and falling, dominated the flat, and the fact of his presence preoccupied the one woman in the kitchen and the other in the sitting-room....

Christine noticed that the thickness of the pages read had imperceptibly increased to three-quarters of an inch, while the thickness of the unread pages had diminished to a quarter of an inch.  And she also noticed, on the open page, another phenomenon.  It was the failing of the day—­the faintest shadow on the page.  With incredible transience another of those brief interruptions of darkness which in London in winter are called days was ending.  She rose and went to the discreetly-curtained window, and, conscious of the extreme propriety of her appearance, boldly pulled aside the curtain and looked across, through naked glass, at the hotel nearly opposite.  There was not a sound, not a movement, in Cork Street.  Cork Street, the flat, the hotel, the city, the universe, lay entranced and stupefied beneath the grey vapours of the Sabbath.  The sensation to Christine was melancholy, but it was exquisitely melancholy.