And she went up to her room every night with limbs exhausted, but with head clear enough to balance her accounts and go through her money.  She did this in bed with thick gloves on.  If often she did not sleep well, it was not because of the distant guns, but because of her preoccupation with the subject of finance.  She was making money, and she wanted to make more.  She was always inventing ways of economy.  She was so anxious to achieve independence that money was always in her mind.  She began to love gold, to love hoarding it, and to hate paying it away.

One morning her charwoman, who by good fortune was nearly as precise as Sophia herself, failed to appear.  When the moment came for serving M. Niepce’s breakfast, Sophia hesitated, and then decided to look after the old man personally.  She knocked at his door, and went boldly in with the tray and candle.  He started at seeing her; she was wearing a blue apron, as the charwoman did, but there could be no mistaking her for the charwoman.  Niepce looked older in bed than when dressed.  He had a rather ridiculous, undignified appearance, common among old men before their morning toilette is achieved; and a nightcap did not improve it.  His rotund paunch lifted the bedclothes, upon which, for the sake of extra warmth, he had spread unmajestic garments.  Sophia smiled to herself; but the contempt implied by that secret smile was softened by the thought:  “Poor old man!” She told him briefly that she supposed the charwoman to be ill.  He coughed and moved nervously.  His benevolent and simple face beamed on her paternally as she fixed the tray by the bed.

“I really must open the window for one little second,” she said, and did so.  The chill air of the street came through the closed shutters, and the old man made a noise as of shivering.  She pushed back the shutters, and closed the window, and then did the same with the other two windows.  It was almost day in the room.

“You will no longer need the candle,” she said, and came back to the bedside to extinguish it.

The benign and fatherly old man put his arm round her waist.  Fresh from the tonic of pure air, and with the notion of his ridiculousness still in her mind, she was staggered for an instant by this gesture.  She had never given a thought to the temperament of the old grocer, the husband of a young wife.  She could not always imaginatively keep in mind the effect of her own radiance, especially under such circumstances.  But after an instant her precocious cynicism, which had slept, sprang up.  “Naturally!  I might have expected it!” she thought with blasting scorn.

“Take away your hand!” she said bitterly to the amiable old fool.  She did not stir.

He obeyed, sheepishly.

“Do you wish to remain with me?” she asked, and as he did not immediately answer, she said in a most commanding tone:  “Answer, then!”

“Yes,” he said feebly.

“Well, behave properly.”