placidity and quiet affection. She still assisted him as before, their
hands still met amidst the sausage-meat, she still glanced over his
shoulder into the pots and pans, and still nothing but the great fire in
the kitchen brought the blood to their cheeks.

However, Lisa was a woman of practical common sense, and speedily saw
the folly of allowing eighty-five thousand francs to lie idle in a chest
of drawers. Quenu would have willingly stowed them away again at the
bottom of the salting-tub until he had gained as much more, when they
could have retired from business and have gone to live at Suresnes, a
suburb to which both were partial. Lisa, however, had other ambitions.
The Rue Pirouette did not accord with her ideas of cleanliness, her
craving for fresh air, light, and healthy life. The shop where Uncle
Gradelle had accumulated his fortune, sou by sou, was a long, dark
place, one of those suspicious looking pork butchers' shops of the old
quarters of the city, where the well-worn flagstones retain a strong
odour of meat in spite of constant washings. Now the young woman longed
for one of those bright modern shops, ornamented like a drawing-room,
and fringing the footway of some broad street with windows of
crystalline transparence. She was not actuated by any petty ambition to
play the fine lady behind a stylish counter, but clearly realised that
commerce in its latest development needed elegant surroundings. Quenu
showed much alarm the first time his wife suggested that they ought to
move and spend some of their money in decorating a new shop. However,
Lisa only shrugged her shoulders and smiled at finding him so timorous.

One evening, when night was falling and the shop had grown dark, Quenu
and Lisa overheard a woman of the neighbourhood talking to a friend
outside their door.