He found both drawing-room and dining-room equally unbearable in his present mood, for both were oppressively characteristic of Helwise, curiously so, since her character seemed always a shifting thing, sliding through your fingers and resting nowhere. He had lost his mother early--before his teens--but the house, under the firm conservatism of his father and an old servant, had kept her memory and her tenets for long. Helwise, however, had banished them very completely. With a long-nursed resentment he marked the disorder of the dining-room, the drunken regiment of chairs, the holes in the lace curtains, the cheap almanacs pinned haphazard between the good prints. Helwise loved to surround herself with calendars. They gave her a sense of keeping even with Time. He could not steal a march on her by a single day, while some grocer’s tribute marked the black footsteps of his pilgrimage. Yet she rarely availed herself of their services, left them hanging for years--horrible traps to the unwary--her own hasty references being invariably directed to the wrong month. Lanty frowned distastefully at their almost ribald askewness, at the torn places in the paper where the crooked pins had slipped, at the untidy hearth and wild mass of correspondence on the open desk. It should have been a handsome room, by rights, for it was bright and well proportioned. The severe furniture that his father had bought had mellowed with time, and the few bits of silver on the sideboard had lost their parvenu air of recent presentation. He had chosen the carpet himself, and its soft, dark tints still pleased him, in spite of the tread worn white by the hurrying feet of his aunt. But there was no ease or homeliness in the room, and it was certainly not handsome, save as an elderly _roué_ of once better days is handsome, in a last drunken effort after dignity and repose.