Don't come into the work-room, you'd be in our way. Stay in the
bedroom."

And he resumed his minute task, his face again in the reflection of a
glass globe full of green-colored water, through which the lamp shed a
circle of bright light over his work.

"Take the chairs!" called out Madame Lorilleux in her turn. "It's that
lady, isn't it? Very well, very well!"

She had rolled the wire and she carried it to the forge, and then,
reviving the fire of the brazier with a large wooden fan, she proceeded
to temper the wire before passing it through the last holes of the
draw-plate.

Coupeau moved the chairs forward and seated Gervaise by the curtain. The
room was so narrow that he could not sit beside her, so he sat behind
her, leaning over her shoulder to explain the work in progress. Gervaise
was intimidated by this strange reception and felt uneasy. She had a
buzzing in her ears and couldn't hear clearly. She thought the wife
looked older than her thirty years and not very neat with her hair in a
pigtail dangling down the back of her loosely worn wrapper. The husband,
who was only a year older, appeared already an old man with mean, thin
lips, as he sat there working in his shirt sleeves with his bare feet
thrust into down at the heel slippers. Gervaise was dismayed by the
smallness of the shop, the grimy walls, the rustiness of the tools, and
the black soot spread all over what looked like the odds and ends of a
scrap-iron peddler's wares.

"And the gold?" asked Gervaise in a low voice.