i, with some cheese and an
apple. Christine had coffee. Ah, she must always have her coffee.
As for a cigarette, she never smoked when alone, because she did
not really care for smoking. Marthe, however, enjoyed smoking, and
Christine gave her a cigarette, which she lighted while clearing the
table. One was mistress, the other servant, but the two women were
constantly meeting on the plane of equality. Neither of them could
avoid it, or consistently tried to avoid it. Although Marthe did not
eat with Christine, if a meal was in progress she generally came
into the sitting-room with her mouth more or less full of food. Their
repasts were trifles, passovers, unceremonious and irregular peckings,
begun and finished in a few moments. And if Marthe was always untidy
in her person, Christine, up till three in the afternoon, was also
untidy. They went about the flat in a wonderful state of unkempt and
insecure slovenliness. And sometimes Marthe might be lolling in the
sitting-room over the illustrations in _La Vie Parisienne_, which was
part of the apparatus of the flat, while Christine was in the tiny
kitchen washing gloves as she alone could wash them.

The flat lapsed into at any rate a superficial calm. Marthe, seeing
that fate had deprived her of the usual consolations of religion,
determined to reward herself by remaining a perfect slattern for the
rest of the day. She would not change at all. She would not wash up
either the breakfast things or the lunch things. Leaving a small ring
of gas alight in the gas stove, she sat down all dirty on a hard
chair in front of it and fell into a luxurious catalepsy. In the
sitting-room Christine sat upright on the sofa and read lusciously a
French translation of _East Lynne_. She was in no hurry for the man to
waken; her sense of time was very imperfect; she was never pricked by
the thought that life is short and that many urgent things demand to
be done before the grave opens. Nor was she apprehensive of unpleasant
complications. The man was in the flat, but it was her flat; her law
ran in the flat; and the door was fast against invasion. Still, the
gentle snore of the man, rising and falling, dominated the flat, and
the fact of his presence preoccupied the one woman in the kitchen and
the other in the sitting-room....

Christine noticed that the thickness of the pages read had
imperceptibly increased to three-quarters of an inch, while the
thickness of the unread pages had dimin