ew calm moments, she
would have broken down under the tension of her nervous system. These
spells of somnolence gave her strength to suffer again, and become
terrified the ensuing night. As a matter of fact she did not sleep,
she barely closed her lids, and was lost in a dream of peace. When a
customer entered, she opened her eyes, served the few sous worth of
articles asked for, and fell back into the floating reverie.

In this manner she passed three or four hours of perfect happiness,
answering her aunt in monosyllables, and yielding with real enjoyment to
these moments of unconsciousness which relieved her of her thoughts, and
completely overcame her. She barely, at long intervals, cast a glance
into the arcade, and was particularly at her ease in cloudy weather,
when it was dark and she could conceal her lassitude in the gloom.

The damp and disgusting arcade, crossed by a lot of wretched drenched
pedestrians, whose umbrellas dripped upon the tiles, seemed to her like
an alley in a low quarter, a sort of dirty, sinister corridor, where
no one would come to seek and trouble her. At moments, when she saw the
dull gleams of light that hung around her, when she smelt the bitter
odour of the dampness, she imagined she had just been buried alive, that
she was underground, at the bottom of a common grave swarming with dead.
And this thought consoled and appeased her, for she said to herself that
she was now in security, that she was about to die and would suffer no
more.

But sometimes she had to keep her eyes open; Suzanne paid her a visit,
and remained embroidering near the counter all the afternoon. The wife
of Olivier, with her putty face and slow movements, now pleased Therese,
who experienced strange relief in observing this poor, broken-up
creature, and had made a friend of her. She loved to see her at her
side, smiling with her faint smile, more dead than alive, and bringing
into the shop the stuffy odour of the cemetery. When the blue eyes of
Suzanne, transparent as glass, rested fixedly on those of Therese, the
latter experienced a beneficent chill in the marrow of her bones.

Therese remained thus until four o'clock, when she returned to the
kitchen, and there again sought fatigue, preparing dinner for Laurent
with febrile haste. But when her husband appeared on the threshold she
felt a tightening in the throat, and all her being once more became a
prey to anguish.

Each day, the sensations of the couple w