She never heard a word of Gerald nor of her family. In the
thousands of people who stayed under her perfect roof, not one
mentioned Bursley nor disclosed a knowledge of anybody that Sophia
had known. Several men had the wit to propose marriage to her with
more or less skilfulness, but none of them was skilful enough to
perturb her heart. She had forgotten the face of love. She was a
landlady. She was THE landlady: efficient, stylish, diplomatic,
and tremendously experienced. There was no trickery, no baseness
of Parisian life that she was not acquainted with and armed
against. She could not be startled and she could not be swindled.
Years passed, until there was a vista of years behind her.
Sometimes she would think, in an unoccupied moment, "How strange
it is that I should be here, doing what I am doing!" But the
regular ordinariness of her existence would instantly seize her
again. At the end of 1878, the Exhibition Year, her Pension
consisted of two floors instead of one, and she had turned the two
hundred pounds stolen from Gerald into over two thousand.
BOOK IV
WHAT LIFE IS
CHAPTER I
FRENSHAM'S
I
Matthew Peel-Swynnerton sat in the long dining-room of the Pension
Frensham, Rue Lord Byron, Paris; and he looked out of place there.
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