Madame Foucault made the beginning of a gesture, as if she meant to kiss Sophia with those thick, marred lips; but refrained.  Her head sank back, and then she had a recurrence of the fit of nervous sobbing.  Immediately afterwards there was the sound of a latchkey in the front-door of the flat; the bedroom door was open.  Still sobbing very violently, she cocked her ear, and pushed the bank-notes under the pillow.

Madame Laurence—­as she was called:  Sophia had never heard her surname—­came straight into the bedroom, and beheld the scene with astonishment in her dark twinkling eyes.  She was usually dressed in black, because people said that black suited her, and because black was never out of fashion; black was an expression of her idiosyncrasy.  She showed a certain elegance, and by comparison with the extreme disorder of Madame Foucault and the deshabille of Sophia her appearance, all fresh from a modish restaurant, was brilliant; it gave her an advantage over the other two—­that moral advantage which ceremonial raiment always gives.

“What is it that passes?” she demanded.

“He has chucked me, Laurence!” exclaimed Madame Foucault, in a sort of hysteric scream which seemed to force its way through her sobs.  From the extraordinary freshness of Madame Foucault’s woe, it might have been supposed that her young man had only that instant strode out.

Laurence and Sophia exchanged a swift glance; and Laurence, of course, perceived that Sophia’s relations with her landlady and nurse were now of a different, a more candid order.  She indicated her perception of the change by a single slight movement of the eyebrows.

“But listen, Aimee,” she said authoritatively.  “You must not let yourself go like that.  He will return.”

“Never!” cried Madame Foucault.  “It is finished.  And he is the last!”

Laurence, ignoring Madame Foucault, approached Sophia.  “You have an air very fatigued,” she said, caressing Sophia’s shoulder with her gloved hand.  “You are pale like everything.  All this is not for you.  It is not reasonable to remain here, you still suffering!  At this hour!  Truly not reasonable!”

Her hands persuaded Sophia towards the corridor.  And, in fact, Sophia did then notice her own exhaustion.  She departed from the room with the ready obedience of physical weakness, and shut her door.

After about half an hour, during which she heard confused noises and murmurings, her door half opened.

“May I enter, since you are not asleep?” It was Laurence’s voice.  Twice, now, she had addressed Sophia without adding the formal ‘madame.’

“Enter, I beg you,” Sophia called from the bed.  “I am reading.”

Laurence came in.  Sophia was both glad and sorry to see her.  She was eager to hear gossip which, however, she felt she ought to despise.  Moreover, she knew that if they talked that night they would talk as friends, and that Laurence would ever afterwards treat her with the familiarity of a friend.  This she dreaded.  Still, she knew that she would yield, at any rate, to the temptation to listen to gossip.