"And I shall be only too glad to have it!" answered Virginie with a shiver. She had been waiting at the grocer's, she said, until she was chilled through and through. The heat of that room was delicious, and then she stirred her coffee and said she liked the damp, sweet smell of the freshly ironed linen. She and Mamma Coupeau were the only ones who had chairs; the others sat on wooden footstools, so low that they seemed to be on the floor. Virginie suddenly stooped down to her hostess and said with a smile: "Do you remember that day at the lavatory?" Gervaise colored; she could not answer. This was just what she had been dreading. In a moment she felt sure she would hear Lantier's name. She knew it was coming. Virginie drew nearer to her. The apprentices lingered over their coffee and told each other as they looked stupidly into the street what they would do if they had an income of ten thousand francs. Virginie changed her seat and took a footstool by the side of Gervaise, who felt weak and cowardly and helpless to change the conversation or to stave off what was coming. She breathlessly awaited the next words, her heart big with an emotion which she would not acknowledge to herself. "I do not wish to give you any pain," said Virginie blandly. "Twenty times the words have been on my lips, but I hesitated. Pray don't think I bear you any malice." She tipped up her cup and drank the last drop of her coffee. Gervaise, with her heart in her mouth, waited in a dull agony of suspense, asking herself if Virginie could have forgiven the insult in the lavatory. There was a glitter in the woman's eyes she did not like. "You had an excuse," Virginie added as she placed her cup on the table. "You had been abominably treated. I should have killed someone." And then, dropping her little-affected tone, she continued more rapidly: "They were not happy, I assure you, not at all happy. They lived in a dirty street, where the mud was up to their knees. I went to breakfast with them two days after he left you and found them in the height of a quarrel. You know that Adele is a wretch. She is my sister, to be sure, but she is a wretch all the same. As to Lantier--well, you know him, so I need not describe him. But for a yes or a no he would not hesitate to thresh any woman that lives. Oh, they had a beautiful time! Their quarrels were heard all over the neighborhood. One day the police were sent for, they made such a hubbub."