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
--and indeed suggested the kept mistress. A clock in the fashionable
style stood on the velvet-covered mantelpiece. There was a nicely
fitted cabinet, and the Chinese flower-stands were handsomely filled.
The bed, the toilet-table, the wardrobe with its mirror, the little
sofa, and all the lady's frippery bore the stamp of fashion or
caprice. Though everything was quite third-rate as to elegance or
quality, and nothing was absolutely newer than three years old, a
dandy would have had no fault to find but that the taste of all this
luxury was commonplace. Art, and the distinction that comes of the
choice of things that taste assimilates, was entirely wanting. A
doctor of social science would have detected a lover in two or three
specimens of costly trumpery, which could only have come there through
that demi-god--always absent, but always present if the lady is
married.

The dinner, four hours behind time, to which the husband, wife, and
child sat down, betrayed the financial straits in which the household
found itself, for the table is the surest thermometer for gauging the
income of a Parisian family. Vegetable soup made with the water
haricot beans had been boiled in, a piece of stewed veal and potatoes
sodden with water by way of gravy, a dish of haricot beans, and cheap
cherries, served and eaten in cracked plates a