retending 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--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 i