This room did duty as a museum of certain objects, such as are
never seen but in this kind of amphibious household; nameless
objects with the stamp at once of luxury and penury. Among other
curiosities Hippolyte noticed a splendidly finished telescope,
hanging over the small discolored glass that decorated the
chimney. To harmonize with this strange collection of furniture,
there was, between the chimney and the partition, a wretched
sideboard of painted wood, pretending to be mahogany, of all
woods the most impossible to imitate. But the slippery red
quarries, the shabby little rugs in front of the chairs, and all
the furniture, shone with the hard rubbing cleanliness which
lends a treacherous lustre to old things by making their defects,
their age, and their long service still more conspicuous. An
indescribable odor pervaded the room, a mingled smell of the
exhalations from the lumber room, and the vapors of the
dining-room, with those from the stairs, though the window was
partly open. The air from the street fluttered the dusty curtains,
which were carefully drawn so as to hide the window bay, where
former tenants had testified to their presence by various
ornamental additions--a sort of domestic fresco.

Adelaide hastened to open the door of the inner room, where she
announced the painter with evident pleasure. Hippolyte, who, of
yore, had seen the same signs of poverty in his mother's home,
noted them with the singular vividness of impression which
characterizes the earliest acquisitions of memory, and entered
into the details of this existence better than any one else would
have done. As he recognized the facts of his life as a child, the
kind young fellow felt neither scorn for disguised misfortune nor
pride in the luxury he had lately conquered for his mother.