Mme Bijard tied up the linen and staggered off under their weight while Gervaise turned back to finish her cap. Alas! The stove and the irons were alike red hot; she must wait a quarter of an hour before she could touch the irons, and Gervaise covered the fire with a couple of shovelfuls of cinders. She then hung a sheet before the window to keep out the sun. Coupeau took a place in the corner, refusing to budge an inch, and his wife and all her assistants went to work on each side of the square table. Each woman had at her right a flat brick on which to set her iron. In the center of the table a dish of water with a rag and a brush in it and also a bunch of tall lilies in a broken jar. Mme Putois had attacked the basket of linen prepared by Gervaise, and Augustine was ironing her towels, with her nose in the air, deeply interested in a fly that was buzzing about. As to Clemence, she was polishing off her thirty-fifth shirt; as she boasted of this great feat Coupeau staggered toward her. "Madame," she called, "please keep him away; he will bother me, and I shall scorch my shirt." "Let her be," said Gervaise without any especial energy. "We are in a great hurry today!" Well, that was not his fault; he did not mean to touch the girl; he only wanted to see what she was about. "Really," said his wife, looking up from her fluting iron, "I think you had best go to bed." He began to talk again. "You need not make such a fuss, Clemence; it is only because these women are here, and--" But he could say no more; Gervaise quietly laid one hand on his mouth and the other on his shoulder and pushed him toward his room. He struggled a little and with a silly laugh asked if Clemence was not coming too. Gervaise undressed her husband and tucked him up in bed as if he had been a child and then returned to her fluting irons in time to still a grand dispute that was going on about an iron that had not been properly cleaned. In the profound silence that followed her appearance she could hear her husband's thick voice: "What a silly wife I've got! The idea of putting me to bed in broad daylight!" Suddenly he began to snore, and Gervaise uttered a sigh of relief. She used her fluting iron for a minute and then said quietly: "There is no need of being offended by anything a man does when he is in this state. He is not an accountable being. He did not intend to insult you. Clemence, you know what a tipsy man is--he respects neither father nor mother." She uttered these words in an indifferent, matter-of-fact way, not in the least disturbed that he had forgotten the respect due to her and to her roof and really seeing no harm in his conduct. The work now went steadily on, and Gervaise calculated they would be finished by eleven o'clock. The heat was intense; the smell of charcoal deadened the air, while the branch of white lilies slowly faded and filled the room with their sweetness.