luxury seen in many Paris homes, and typical of a certain class of
household. In the drawing-room, the furniture covered with shabby
cotton velvet, the plaster statuettes pretending to be Florentine
bronze, the clumsy cast chandelier merely lacquered, with cheap glass
saucers, the carpet, whose small cost was accounted for in advancing
life by the quality of cotton used in the manufacture, now visible to
the naked eye,--everything, down to the curtains, which plainly showed
that worsted damask has not three years of prime, proclaimed poverty
as loudly as a beggar in rags at a church door.

The dining-room, badly kept by a single servant, had the sickening
aspect of a country inn; everything looked greasy and unclean.

Monsieur's room, very like a schoolboy's, furnished with the bed and
fittings remaining from his bachelor days, as shabby and worn as he
was, dusted perhaps once a week--that horrible room where everything
was in a litter, with old socks hanging over the horsehair-seated
chairs, the pattern outlined in dust, was that of a man to whom home
is a matter of indifference, who lives out of doors, gambling in cafes
or elsewhere.

Madame's room was an exception to the squalid slovenliness that
disgraced the living rooms, where the curtains were yellow with smoke
and dust, and where the child, evidently left to himself, littered
every spot with his toys. Valerie's room and dressing-room were
situated in the part of the house which, on one side of the courtyard,
joined the front half, looking out on the street, to the wing forming
the inner side of the court backing against the adjoining property.
Handsomely hung with chintz, furnished with rosewood, and thickly
carpeted, they proclaimed themselves as belonging to a pretty woman