At first the duties did not prove quite so simple as had been promised to one who had never had anything to do with producing a paper before, and the printer worried him a good deal. But Beaufort was highly satisfied. The novice was swift to grasp details, and took such an infinity of pains in seasoning and amplifying the réchauffés, that really his stuff read almost like original matter. As he began to feel his feet, too, he put forth ideas, and, finding that the other was quite ready to listen to them, gained confidence, and was not without a mistaken belief that in so quickly mastering the mysteries of a weekly and painfully exiguous little print, of which four-fifths were eclectic, he had displayed ability of a brilliant order. Primarily the labour that he devoted to the task was ludicrously disproportionate to the result, but by degrees he got through it with more rapidity. When a month had passed since the morning that he first sat down in the assistant-editorial chair of _The World and his Wife_, he discovered that he was doing in an afternoon what it had formerly taken two days to accomplish, and he marvelled how he could have been so stupid. The work had devolved upon him almost entirely now, for Beaufort, having shown him the way in which he should go, dropped in late, and withdrew early, and did little but drink vermouth and say, "Yes, certainly, capital!" while he was there. It was Kent who proposed the subject for the week's interview, wrote--or re-wrote--the causerie, and who even secured the majority of the few advertisements that they obtained. Also, when the semi-celebrity to be interviewed was not a good-looking woman, it was he who was the interviewer. When the lady was attractive, Billy Beaufort attended to that department himself. Cynthia had found a pension de famille in the Madeleine quarter, highly recommended for a permanency, and here they had removed. They had two fairly large bedrooms, communicating, on the fourth floor, and paid a hundred and fifty francs a week. It did not leave much over from the salary for their incidental expenses, after reckoning the nurse's wages; but it was supposed to be very cheap, and madame Garin and her vivacious daughter, who skipped a good deal for thirty years of age, and was voluble in bad English, begged them on no account to let any of the other boarders hear that they were received at such terms, for that would certainly be the commencement of madame Garin and her daughter's ruin. Some of the boarders were French people, but the meals, with which twenty-five persons down the long table appeared to be fairly content, were very bad. They would have been thought bad even in a boarding-house in Bloomsbury. The twenty-five persons were waited on by a leisurely and abstracted Italian, and the intervals between the meagre courses were of such duration that Kent swore that he had generally forgotten what the soup had been called by the time that the cold entree reached him.