“You see,” she said, “there is a piano in it.”

“But I don’t play the piano,” the man protested, shocked at the price.

“That is not my fault,” she said.

He agreed to pay the price demanded for the room because of the opportunity of getting good meals much cheaper than in the restaurants.  Like M. Niepce, he was a ‘siege-widower,’ his wife having been put under shelter in Brittany.  Sophia took to the servant’s bedroom on the sixth floor.  It measured nine feet by seven, and had no window save a skylight; but Sophia was in a fair way to realize a profit of at least four pounds a week, after paying for everything.

On the night when she installed herself in that chamber, amid a world of domestics and poor people, she worked very late, and the rays of her candles shot up intermittently through the skylight into a black heaven; at intervals she flitted up and down the stairs with a candle.  Unknown to her a crowd gradually formed opposite the house in the street, and at about one o’clock in the morning a file of soldiers woke the concierge and invaded the courtyard, and every window was suddenly populated with heads.  Sophia was called upon to prove that she was not a spy signalling to the Prussians.  Three quarters of an hour passed before her innocence was established and the staircases cleared of uniforms and dishevelled curiosity.  The childish, impossible unreason of the suspicion against her completed in Sophia’s mind the ruin of the reputation of the French people as a sensible race.  She was extremely caustic the next day to her boarders.  Except for this episode, the frequency of military uniforms in the streets, the price of food, and the fact that at least one house in four was flying either the ambulance flag or the flag of a foreign embassy (in an absurd hope of immunity from the impending bombardment) the siege did not exist for Sophia.  The men often talked about their guard-duty, and disappeared for a day or two to the ramparts, but she was too busy to listen to them.  She thought of nothing but her enterprise, which absorbed all her powers.  She arose at six a.m., in the dark, and by seven-thirty M. Niepce and his friend had been served with breakfast, and much general work was already done.  At eight o’clock she went out to market.  When asked why she continued to buy at a high price, articles of which she had a store, she would reply:  “I am keeping all that till things are much dearer.”  This was regarded as astounding astuteness.

On the fifteenth of October she paid the quarter’s rent of the flat, four hundred francs, and was accepted as tenant.  Her ears were soon quite accustomed to the sound of cannon, and she felt that she had always been a citizeness of Paris, and that Paris had always been besieged.  She did not speculate about the end of the siege; she lived from day to day.  Occasionally she had a qualm of fear, when the firing grew momentarily louder, or when she heard that battles