Four begging letters from people who had no claim on her or the institution; two from inventors--one of whom had quite simply discovered the secret of perpetual motion, which, he thought, would be of especial benefit to blind people,--the other had invented a typewriter wonderfully adapted for the blind, a detailed description of which he forwarded. In her lightning survey the Directrice perceived that the machine weighed seventy pounds, threw the letter violently in the waste-paper basket, and turned to the next. Over this one she lingered a moment, her face softening again. It was from one of her graduates, who had come into the institution with the horrors, who had clung to her like a dead weight for the first month of his stay, but who, before the end of his six months' sojourn there, had become perfect master of the knitting machine. Just before leaving, he had married the nurse who had taken care of him in the hospital, the Directrice being, of course, chief witness at the wedding. And now, after a year, he wrote her to make a report. They earned their living well, he and his wife, he had bought three other knitting machines and had a little workroom in his house, where he, his wife and two employees carried on a lucrative business; that is, his wife did until the arrival of a baby--such a healthy, hearty little boy whom they had called Victor, because the Directrice's name is Victorine; and please, will she be his godmother?... Yes, there are good moments in the life of the Directrice, moments when there is no mask on her face, either of courageous smiling or of bitter fatigue; when she is, for just a moment, a very happy woman, happy in a curious, impersonal way which was as little within her capacities before the war as all the rest of her laborious, surcharged life. And then, somehow, it was lunch time. Where had the morning gone? She must needs go in now and sit down at one of the long tables, looking up and down the line of blind faces, watching the fumbling hands trying so hard to learn the lesson of self-reliance in the new blackness. She had acquired an almost automatic dexterity in turning a cup so that the handle will be in the right place for the groping hand, in cutting up a morsel of meat on the plate of the man beside her, while engaging him in lively conversation so that he shall not notice it, in slipping the glass under the water carafe which is being awkwardly tilted by one of those dreadful searching hands. Through some last prodigy of dexterity she ate her own lunch while she did this. There were four of the long tables, and every day she must sit at a different one, or the others will be jealous.