Her job was in one of those Government Departments, whose staff, depleted by general mobilization, and further by repeated “combing-out,” hardly sufficed to keep going that multiplicity of printed forms by which France is governed. She wrote a good hand, having acquired that art at a convent school where it, at least, was not reckoned among the subversive sciences. Perhaps she dimly saw in the power to write and read one of the advantages that such as she possessed over the less lucky. Handwriting, at any rate, was no difficulty. Figures she handled with respect, almost with appetite. As the first newness of the life thawed and broke before her, she began to prepare herself to take the lead in the office, as she had taken it at the farm. By the time August was turning into September, she almost smiled as she took her week’s money. She would not have paid Berthe so much for doing such a job. Eight to twelve and two to six seemed to her a ridiculously light day. The heat of the town was sometimes oppressive, but the office, about the ill-kept state of which she grimaced to herself, was on the north side of one of those rococo barrack-like buildings that link the architecture of the chef-lieux of Northern France to that of Mediterranean civilization. That is, it had the dank chill of a tomb. She survived. As for the life in general, her iron health stood it well. She missed the air and exercise, but her diet was not full enough to allow her to fatten. She had been welcomed, of course, by Cécile Blanquart, and taken, not without a shade of kindly patronage, to lodge with the aunt who sheltered Cécile. The aunt was one of those widows of the small official class who seemed to have disappeared from England since Dickens. She was poorer, prouder, more impossibly ugly and mean than anything surviving to us. She would have housed Madeleine, had not each of her tiny rooms already contained two people at least. Clinging to any ha’pence that were to be had, she arranged that the new-comer should dine at the frugal common table she kept, and sleep a few streets away in the third-floor attic over the pork butcher’s. Madeleine appeared to her what is called in France “sérieuse.” To Madeleine, the arrangement appeared nothing short of heaven sent.