“I am sure that it is too much.”
“Not at all!” Sophia repeated. “Nine weeks at seventy-five. That makes six hundred and seventy-five. Here are seven hundreds.”
“I have no change,” said Madame Foucault. “I have nothing.”
“That will pay for the hire of the bath,” said Sophia.
She laid the notes on the pillow. Madame Foucault looked at them gluttonously, as any other person would have done in her place. She did not touch them. After an instant she burst into wild tears.
“But why do you cry?” Sophia asked, softened.
“I—I don’t know!” spluttered Madame Foucault. “You are so beautiful. I am so content that we saved you.” Her great wet eyes rested on Sophia.
It was sentimentality. Sophia ruthlessly set it down as sentimentality. But she was touched. She was suddenly moved. Those women, such as they were in their foolishness, probably had saved her life—and she a stranger! Flaccid as they were, they had been capable of resolute perseverance there. It was possible to say that chance had thrown them upon an enterprise which they could not have abandoned till they or death had won. It was possible to say that they hoped vaguely to derive advantage from their labours. But even then? Judged by an ordinary standard, those women had been angels of mercy. And Sophia was despising them, cruelly taking their motives to pieces, accusing them of incapacity when she herself stood a supreme proof of their capacity in, at any rate, one direction! In a rush of emotion she saw her hardness and her injustice.
She bent down. “Never can I forget how kind you have been to me. It is incredible! Incredible!” She spoke softly, in tones loaded with genuine feeling. It was all she said. She could not embroider on the theme. She had no talent for thanksgiving.
Madame Foucault made the beginning of a gesture, as if she meant to kiss Sophia with those thick, marred lips; but refrained. Her head sank back, and then she had a recurrence of the fit of nervous sobbing. Immediately afterwards there was the sound of a latchkey in the front-door of the flat; the bedroom door was open. Still sobbing very violently, she cocked her ear, and pushed the bank-notes under the pillow.