g expression.

"Ah! it's you; well, well!" murmured he. "We're in a hurry you know.
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.

Her anxious glances searched the corners and sought amongst all that
filth for the resplendence she had dreamt of. But Coupeau burst out
laughing.

"Gold?" said he; "why there's some; there's some more, and there's some
at your feet!"

He pointed successively to the fine wire at which his sister was
working, and to another roll of wire, similar to the ordinary iron
wire, hanging against the wall close to the vise; then going down on all
fours, he picked up, beneath the wooden screen which covered the tiled
floor of the work-room, a piece of waste, a tiny fragment resembling the
point of a rusty needle. But Gervaise protested; that couldn't be gold,
that blackish piece of metal as ugly as iron! He had to bite into
the piece and show her the gleaming notch made by his teeth. Then
he continued his explanations: the employers provided the gold wir