“You are very chic,” said Sophia, uttering her admiration.

“Ah!” said Madame Foucault, shrugging the shoulders of disillusion.  “Chic!  What does that do?”

But she was pleased.

The front-door banged.  Sophia, by herself for the first time in the flat into which she had been carried unconscious and which she had never since left, had the disturbing sensation of being surrounded by mysterious rooms and mysterious things.  She tried to continue reading, but the sentences conveyed nothing to her.  She rose—­she could walk now a little—­and looked out of the window, through the interstices of the pattern of the lace curtains.  The window gave on the courtyard, which was about sixteen feet below her.  A low wall divided the courtyard from that of the next house.  And the windows of the two houses, only to be distinguished by the different tints of their yellow paint, rose tier above tier in level floors, continuing beyond Sophia’s field of vision.  She pressed her face against the glass, and remembered the St. Luke’s Square of her childhood; and just as there from the showroom window she could not even by pressing her face against the glass see the pavement, so here she could not see the roof; the courtyard was like the bottom of a well.  There was no end to the windows; six storeys she could count, and the sills of a seventh were the limit of her view.  Every window was heavily curtained, like her own.  Some of the upper ones had green sunblinds.  Scarcely any sound!  Mysteries brooded without as well as within the flat of Madame Foucault.  Sophia saw a bodiless hand twitch at a curtain and vanish.  She noticed a green bird in a tiny cage on a sill in the next house.  A woman whom she took to be the concierge appeared in the courtyard, deposited a small plant in the track of a ray of sunshine that lighted a corner for a couple of hours in the afternoon, and disappeared again.  Then she heard a piano—­ somewhere.  That was all.  The feeling that secret and strange lives were being lived behind those baffling windows, that humanity was everywhere intimately pulsing around her, oppressed her spirit yet not quite unpleasantly.  The environment softened her glance upon the spectacle of existence, insomuch that sadness became a voluptuous pleasure.  And the environment threw her back on herself, into a sensuous contemplation of the fundamental fact of Sophia Scales, formerly Sophia Baines.

She turned to the room, with the marks of the bath on the floor by the bed, and the draped piano that was never opened, and her two trunks filling up the corner opposite the door.  She had the idea of thoroughly examining those trunks, which Chirac or somebody else must have fetched from the hotel.  At the top of one of them was her purse, tied up with old ribbon and ostentatiously sealed!  How comical these French people were when they deemed it necessary to be serious!  She emptied both trunks, scrutinizing minutely all her goods, and thinking of the varied occasions upon which she had obtained them.  Then she carefully restored them, her mind full of souvenirs newly awakened.