"Ah! You know, one cannot demand the marriage certificate." Madame Foucault indicated by a gesture that the Rue Breda was not the paradise of saints. "When she came before, this lady, was it with the same man?" Sophia asked coldly. "Ah, my faith, no!" exclaimed Madame Foucault, bridling. "It was a bad sort, the other, a...! Ah, no." "Why do you ask my advice?" Sophia abruptly questioned, in a hard, inimical voice. "Is it that it concerns me?" Tears came at once into the eyes of Madame Foucault. "Do not be unkind," she implored. "I'm not unkind," said Sophia, in the same tone. "Shall you leave me if I accept this offer?" There was a pause. "Yes," said Sophia, bluntly. She tried to be large-hearted, large-minded, and sympathetic; but there was no sign of these qualities in her speech. "And if you take with you the furniture which is yours...!" Sophia kept silence. "How am I to live, I demand of you?" Madame Foucault asked weakly. "By being respectable and dealing with respectable people!" said Sophia, uncompromisingly, in tones of steel. "I am unhappy!" murmured the elder woman. "However, you are more strong than I!" She brusquely dabbed her eyes, gave a little sob, and ran out of the room. Sophia listened at the door, and heard her dismiss the would-be tenants of the best bedroom. She wondered that she should possess such moral ascendancy over the woman, she so young and ingenuous! For, of course, she had not meant to remove the furniture. She could hear Madame Foucault sobbing quietly in one of the other rooms; and her lips curled. Before evening a truly astonishing event happened. Perceiving that Madame Foucault showed no signs of bestirring herself, Sophia, with good nature in her heart but not on her tongue, went to her, and said: "Shall I occupy myself with the dinner?" Madame Foucault sobbed more loudly. "That would be very amiable on your part," Madame Foucault managed at last to reply, not very articulately. Sophia put a hat on and went to the grocer's. The grocer, who kept a busy establishment at the corner of the Rue Clausel, was a middle-aged and wealthy man. He had sent his young wife and two children to Normandy until victory over the Prussians should be more assured, and he asked Sophia whether it was true that there was a good bedroom to let in the flat where she lived. His servant was ill of smallpox; he was attacked by anxieties and fears on all sides; he would not enter his own flat on account of possible infection; he liked Sophia, and Madame Foucault had been a customer of his, with intervals, for twenty years. Within an hour he had arranged to rent the middle bedroom at eighty francs a month, and to take his meals there. The terms were modest, but the respectability was prodigious. All the glory of this tenancy fell upon Sophia.