If some day something were to give way, such as an agency going out of business or their being seen as too old, or too unreliable in their work, or one of them falling ill, that was all it would take for everything to come tumbling down. They had no prospects, no reserves. Their minds often turned to this subject, anxiously. They would come back to it incessantly, in spite of themselves. They could see themselves out of work for months on end, taking on penny jobs just to survive, borrowing, begging. Then, sometimes, they would experience moments of intense despair. They would dream of offices, of established posts, of regular hours, of proper contracts of employment. But these reversed images threw them into perhaps even greater despair. They just could not, so they thought, recognise themselves in the face of a desk-bound executive, however splendid his apparel. They decided that they detested hierarchies, and that solutions, miraculous or other, would come from elsewhere, from the world, from History. They went on in their bumpy way; it fitted their natural inclination. In an imperfect world, of this they convinced themselves easily, it was not by any means the most imperfect way. They lived for the day; in six hours they would spend what it had taken three days to earn; they often borrowed; they ate ghastly French fries, smoked their last cigarette between them, sometimes spent two hours looking for a spare metro ticket, wore recycled shirts, listened to scratched records, hitch-hiked to get places, and, quite frequently still, put off changing the sheets for five or six weeks. They were quite near to believing that, all in all, this kind of life was not without its charm.