The better part of the day was now gone, and it was this way every day, for the shop was the refuge and haunt of all the chilly people in the neighborhood. Gervaise liked the reputation of having the most comfortable room in the _Quartier_, and she held her receptions, as the Lorilleux and Boche clique said, with a sniff of disdain. She would, in fact, have liked to bring in the very poor whom she saw shivering outside. She became very friendly toward a journeyman painter, an old man of seventy, who lived in a loft of the house, where he shivered with cold and hunger. He had lost his three sons in the Crimea, and for two years his hand had been so cramped by rheumatism that he could not hold a brush. Whenever Gervaise saw Father Bru she called him in, made a place for him near the stove and gave him some bread and cheese. Father Bru, with his white beard and his face wrinkled like an old apple, sat in silent content for hours at a time, enjoying the warmth and the crackling of the coke. "What are you thinking about?" Gervaise would say gaily. "Of nothing--of all sorts of things," he would reply with a dazed air. The workwomen laughed and thought it a good joke to ask if he were in love. He paid little heed to them but relapsed into silent thought. From this time Virginie often spoke to Gervaise of Lantier, and one day she said she had just met him. But as the clearstarcher made no reply Virginie then said no more. But on the next day she returned to the subject and told her that he had talked long and tenderly of her. Gervaise was much troubled by these whispered conversations in the corner of her shop. The name of Lantier made her faint and sick at heart. She believed herself to be an honest woman. She meant, in every way, to do right and to shun the wrong, because she felt that only in doing so could she be happy. She did not think much of Coupeau because she was conscious of no shortcomings toward him. But she thought of her friend at the forge, and it seemed to her that this return of her interest in Lantier, faint and undecided as it was, was an infidelity to Goujet and to that tender friendship which had become so very precious to her. Her heart was much troubled in these days. She dwelt on that time when her first lover left her. She imagined another day when, quitting Adele, he might return to her--with that old familiar trunk.