Before evening a truly astonishing event happened.  Perceiving that Madame Foucault showed no signs of bestirring herself, Sophia, with good nature in her heart but not on her tongue, went to her, and said: 

“Shall I occupy myself with the dinner?”

Madame Foucault sobbed more loudly.

“That would be very amiable on your part,” Madame Foucault managed at last to reply, not very articulately.

Sophia put a hat on and went to the grocer’s.  The grocer, who kept a busy establishment at the corner of the Rue Clausel, was a middle-aged and wealthy man.  He had sent his young wife and two children to Normandy until victory over the Prussians should be more assured, and he asked Sophia whether it was true that there was a good bedroom to let in the flat where she lived.  His servant was ill of smallpox; he was attacked by anxieties and fears on all sides; he would not enter his own flat on account of possible infection; he liked Sophia, and Madame Foucault had been a customer of his, with intervals, for twenty years.  Within an hour he had arranged to rent the middle bedroom at eighty francs a month, and to take his meals there.  The terms were modest, but the respectability was prodigious.  All the glory of this tenancy fell upon Sophia.

Madame Foucault was deeply impressed.  Characteristically she began at once to construct a theory that Sophia had only to walk out of the house in order to discover ideal tenants for the rooms.  Also she regarded the advent of the grocer as a reward from Providence for her self-denial in refusing the profits of sinfulness.  Sophia felt personally responsible to the grocer for his comfort, and so she herself undertook the preparation of the room.  Madame Foucault was amazed at the thoroughness of her housewifery, and at the ingenuity of her ideas for the arrangement of furniture.  She sat and watched with admiration sycophantic but real.

That night, when Sophia was in bed, Madame Foucault came into the room, and dropped down by the side of the bed, and begged Sophia to be her moral support for ever.  She confessed herself generally.  She explained how she had always hated the negation of respectability; how respectability was the one thing that she had all her life passionately desired.  She said that if Sophia would be her partner in the letting of furnished rooms to respectable persons, she would obey her in everything.  She gave Sophia a list of all the traits in Sophia’s character which she admired.  She asked Sophia to influence her, to stand by her.  She insisted that she would sleep on the sixth floor in the servant’s tiny room; and she had a vision of three bedrooms let to successful tradesmen.  She was in an ecstasy of repentance and good intentions.

Sophia consented to the business proposition; for she had nothing else whatever in prospect, and she shared Madame Foucault’s rosy view about the remunerativeness of the bedrooms.  With three tenants who took meals the two women would be able to feed themselves for nothing and still make a profit on the food; and the rents would be clear gain.