"Sir," she said in a low voice, "please listen to me." The man looked at her from head to foot and went on whistling louder than before. Gervaise grew bolder. She forgot everything except the pangs of hunger. The women under the trees walked up and down with the regularity of wild animals in a cage. "Sir," she said again, "please listen." But the man went on. She walked toward the Hotel Boncœur again, past the hospital, which was now brilliantly lit. There she turned and went back over the same ground--the dismal ground between the slaughterhouses and the place where the sick lay dying. With these two places she seemed to feel bound by some mysterious tie. "Sir, please listen!" She saw her shadow on the ground as she stood near a street lamp. It was a grotesque shadow--grotesque because of her ample proportions. Her limp had become, with time and her additional weight, a very decided deformity, and as she moved the lengthening shadow of herself seemed to be creeping along the sides of the houses with bows and curtsies of mock reverence. Never before had she realized the change in herself. She was fascinated by this shadow. It was very droll, she thought, and she wondered if the men did not think so too. "Sir, please listen!" It was growing late. Man after man, in a beastly state of intoxication, reeled past her; quarrels and disputes filled the air. Gervaise walked on, half asleep. She was conscious of little except that she was starving. She wondered where her daughter was and what she was eating, but it was too much trouble to think, and she shivered and crawled on. As she lifted her face she felt the cutting wind, accompanied by the snow, fine and dry, like gravel. The storm had come. People were hurrying past her, but she saw one man walking slowly. She went toward him. "Sir, please listen!" The man stopped. He did not seem to notice what she said but extended his hand and murmured in a low voice: "Charity, if you please!" The two looked at each other. Merciful heavens! It was Father Bru begging and Mme Coupeau doing worse. They stood looking at each other--equals in misery. The aged workman had been trying to make up his mind all the evening to beg, and the first person he stopped was a woman as poor as himself! This was indeed the irony of fate. Was it not a pity to have toiled for fifty years and then to beg his bread? To have been one of the most flourishing laundresses in Paris and then to make her bed in the gutter? They looked at each other once more, and without a word each went their own way through the fast-falling snow, which blinded Gervaise as she struggled on, the wind wrapping her thin skirts around her legs so that she could hardly walk.