She saw that the second pair of doors, which she had failed to unfasten, also opened into this room.
Between the two pairs of doors was a wide bed.
In front of the central window was a large dressing-table.
To the left of the bed, half hiding the locked doors, was a large screen.
On the marble mantelpiece, reflected in a huge mirror, that ascended to the ornate cornice, was a gilt-and-basalt clock, with pendants to match.
On the opposite side of the room from this was a long wide couch.
The floor was of polished oak, with a skin on either side of the bed.
At the foot of the bed was a small writing-table, with a penny bottle of ink on it.
A few coloured prints and engravings --representing, for example, Louis Philippe and his family, and people perishing on a raft--broke the tedium of the walls.
The first impression on Sophia's eye was one of sombre splendour.
Everything had the air of being richly ornamented, draped, looped, carved, twisted, brocaded into gorgeousness.
The dark crimson bed- hangings fell from massive rosettes in majestic folds.
The counterpane was covered with lace.
The window-curtains had amplitude beyond the necessary, and they were suspended from behind fringed and pleated valances.
The green sofa and its sateen cushions were stiff with applied embroidery.
The chandelier hanging from the middle of the ceiling, modelled to represent cupids holding festoons, was a glittering confusion of gilt and lustres; the lustres tinkled when Sophia stood on a certain part of the floor.
The cane-seated chairs were completely gilded.
There was an effect of spaciousness.
And the situation of the bed between the two double-doors, with the three windows in front and other pairs of doors communicating with other rooms on either hand, produced in addition an admirable symmetry.
But Sophia, with the sharp gaze of a woman brought up in the traditions of a modesty so proud that it scorns ostentation, quickly tested and condemned the details of this chamber that imitated every luxury.
Nothing in it, she found, was 'good.'
And in St. Luke's Square 'goodness' meant honest workmanship, permanence, the absence of pretence.
All the stuffs were cheap and showy and shabby; all the furniture was cracked, warped, or broken.
The clock showed five minutes past twelve at five o'clock.
And further, dust was everywhere, except in those places where even the most perfunctory cleaning could not have left it.
In the obscurer pleatings of draperies it lay thick.
Sophia's lip curled, and instinctively she lifted her peignoir.
One of her mother's phrases came into her head: 'a lick and a promise.'
And then another:
"If you want to leave dirt, leave it where everybody can see it, not in the corners."
She peeped behind the screen, and all the horrible welter of a cabinet de toilette met her gaze: a repulsive medley of foul waters, stained vessels and cloths, brushes, sponges, powders, and pastes.
Clothes were hung up in disorder on rough nails; among them she recognized a dressing-gown of Madame Foucault's, and, behind affairs of later date, the dazzling scarlet cloak in which she had first seen Madame Foucault, dilapidated now.
So this was Madame Foucault's room!
This was the bower from which that elegance emerged, the filth from which had sprung the mature blossom!
She passed from that room direct to another, of which the shutters were closed, leaving it in twilight.
This room too was a bedroom, rather smaller than the middle one, and having only one window, but furnished with the same dubious opulence.
Dust covered it everywhere, and small footmarks were visible in the dust on the floor.
At the back was a small door, papered to match the wall, and within this door was a cabinet de toilette, with no light and no air; neither in the room nor in the closet was there any sign of individual habitation.
She traversed the main bedroom again and found another bedroom to balance the second one, but open to the full light of day, and in a state of extreme disorder; the double- pillowed bed had not even been made: clothes and towels draped all the furniture: shoes were about the floor, and on a piece of string tied across the windows hung a single white stocking, wet.
At the back was a cabinet de toilette, as dark as the other one, a vile malodorous mess of appliances whose familiar forms loomed vague and extraordinarily sinister in the dense obscurity.
Sophia turned away with the righteous disgust of one whose preparations for the gaze of the world are as candid and simple as those of a child.
Concealed dirt shocked her as much as it would have shocked her mother; and as for the trickeries of the toilet table, she contemned them as harshly as a young saint who has never been tempted contemns moral weakness.
She thought of the strange flaccid daily life of those two women, whose hours seemed to slip unprofitably away without any result of achievement.
She had actually witnessed nothing; but since the beginning of her convalescence her ears had heard, and she could piece the evidences together.
There was never any sound in the flat, outside the kitchen, until noon.
Then vague noises and smells would commence.
And about one o'clock Madame Foucault, disarrayed, would come to inquire if the servant had attended to the needs of the invalid.
Then the odours of cookery would accentuate themselves; bells rang; fragments of conversations escaped through doors ajar; occasionally a man's voice or a heavy step; then the fragrance of coffee; sometimes the sound of a kiss, the banging of the front door, the noise of brushing, or of the shaking of a carpet, a little scream as at some trifling domestic contretemps.
Laurence, still in a dressing-gown, would lounge into Sophia's room, dirty, haggard, but polite with a curious stiff ceremony, and would drink her coffee there.
This wandering in peignoirs would continue till three o'clock, and then Laurence might say, as if nerving herself to an unusual and immense effort: