dame Putois is
right, it isn't decent. People will begin to take my house for what it
isn't."

So tall Clemence dressed herself again, grumbling the while. "_Mon
Dieu!_ There's prudery for you."

And she vented her rage on the apprentice, that squint-eyed Augustine
who was ironing some stockings and handkerchiefs beside her. She jostled
her and pushed her with her elbow; but Augustine who was of a surly
disposition, and slyly spiteful in the way of an animal and a drudge,
spat on the back of the other's dress just out of revenge, without being
seen. Gervaise, during this incident, had commenced a cap belonging
to Madame Boche, which she intended to take great pains with. She had
prepared some boiled starch to make it look new again. She was gently
passing a little iron rounded at both ends over the inside of the crown
of the cap, when a bony-looking woman entered the shop, her face covered
with red blotches and her skirts sopping wet. It was a washerwoman
who employed three assistants at the wash-house in the Rue de la
Goutte-d'Or.

"You've come too soon, Madame Bijard!" cried Gervaise. "I told you to
call this evening. I'm too busy to attend to you now!"

But as the washerwoman began lamenting and fearing that she would not be
able to put all the things to soak that day, she consented to give her
the dirty clothes at once. They went to fetch the bundles in the left
hand room where Etienne slept, and returned with enormous armfuls which
they piled up on the floor at the back of the shop. The sorting lasted
a good half hour. Gervaise made heaps all round her, throwing the shirts
in one, the chemises in another, the handkerchiefs, the socks, the
dish-cloths in others. Whenever she came across anything belonging to a
new customer, she marked it with a cross in red cotton thread so as to
know it again. And from all this dirty linen which they were throwing
about there issued an offensive odor in the warm atmosphere.

"Oh! La, la. What a stench!" said Clemence, holding her nose.

"Of course there is! If it were clean they wouldn't send it to us,"
quietly explained Gervaise. "It smells as one would expect it to, that's
all! We said fourteen chemises, didn't we, Madame Bijard? Fifteen,
sixteen, seventeen--"

And she continued counting aloud. Used to this kind of thing she
evinced no disgust. She thrust her bare pink arms deep into the piles of
laundry: shirts yellow with grime, towels stiff from dirty dish water,
sock