To each the welfare of the other was the prime thought.

To give the other the better portion, be it of food or wine, of freedom from care, or ease of mind, and to take the worse, was to each the ground plan of life, as it was its chiefest joy.
In their eyrie above the anxious city they led an existence all their own.

Between them were a hundred jests, Greek to others; and whimsical ways, and fond sayings and old smiles a thousand times repeated.

And things that must be done after one fashion or the sky would fall; and others that must be done after another fashion or the world would end.
When the house was empty of boarders, or nearly empty--though at such times the cupboard also was apt to be bare--there were long hours spent upstairs and surveys of household gear, carried up with difficulty, and reviews of linen and much talk of it, and small meals, taken at the open windows that looked over the Rhone valley and commanded the sunset view.
Such times were times of gaiety though not of prosperity, and far from the worst hours of life--had they but persisted.
But in the March of 1601 a great calamity fell on these two.

A fire, which consumed several houses near the Corraterie, and flung wide through the streets the rumour that the enemy had entered, struck the bedridden woman--aroused at midnight by shouts and the glare of flames--with so dire a terror, not on her own account but on her daughter's, that she was never the same again.