“Pension Frensham,” and Sophia had not removed it.  She often explained that her name was not Frensham; but in vain.  Every visitor inevitably and persistently addressed her according to the sign.  It was past the general comprehension that the proprietress of the Pension Frensham might bear another name than Frensham.  But later there came into being a class of persons, habitues of the Pension Frensham, who knew the real name of the proprietress and were proud of knowing it, and by this knowledge were distinguished from the herd.  What struck Sophia was the astounding similarity of her guests.  They all asked the same questions, made the same exclamations, went out on the same excursions, returned with the same judgments, and exhibited the same unimpaired assurance that foreigners were really very peculiar people.  They never seemed to advance in knowledge.  There was a constant stream of explorers from England who had to be set on their way to the Louvre or the Bon Marche.

Sophia’s sole interest was in her profits.  The excellence of her house was firmly established.  She kept it up, and she kept the modest prices up.  Often she had to refuse guests.  She naturally did so with a certain distant condescension.  Her manner to guests increased in stiff formality; and she was excessively firm with undesirables.  She grew to be seriously convinced that no pension as good as hers existed in the world, or ever had existed, or ever could exist.  Hers was the acme of niceness and respectability.  Her preference for the respectable rose to a passion.  And there were no faults in her establishment.  Even the once despised showy furniture of Madame Foucault had mysteriously changed into the best conceivable furniture; and its cracks were hallowed.

She never heard a word of Gerald nor of her family.  In the thousands of people who stayed under her perfect roof, not one mentioned Bursley nor disclosed a knowledge of anybody that Sophia had known.  Several men had the wit to propose marriage to her with more or less skilfulness, but none of them was skilful enough to perturb her heart.  She had forgotten the face of love.  She was a landlady.  She was the landlady:  efficient, stylish, diplomatic, and tremendously experienced.  There was no trickery, no baseness of Parisian life that she was not acquainted with and armed against.  She could not be startled and she could not be swindled.

Years passed, until there was a vista of years behind her.  Sometimes she would think, in an unoccupied moment, “How strange it is that I should be here, doing what I am doing!” But the regular ordinariness of her existence would instantly seize her again.  At the end of 1878, the Exhibition Year, her Pension consisted of two floors instead of one, and she had turned the two hundred pounds stolen from Gerald into over two thousand.

BOOK IV

WHAT LIFE IS