Paul loves glamor, beauty, and wealth, as well as top-quality items. He loves his job as an usher at Carnegie Hall because he gets to wear a handsome uniform that fits properly and is not worn down at the edges. He loves the beauty and glamor of the concert hall and the people in it.
In contrast, he hates his home because his house is tacky and ugly. For example, he describes his bedroom as follows, with
its horrible yellow wall-paper, the creaking bureau with the greasy plush collar box and over his painted wooden bed the pictures of George Washington and John Calvin, and the framed motto, "Feed my Lambs," which had been worked in red worsted by his mother.
All of this is second-rate, cheap, and tawdry to Paul (and probably to us too). It lacks any flare or originality.
He dislikes his street as well. We learn that he
never went up Cordelia Street without a shudder of loathing. His home was next to the house of the Cumberland minister. He approached it to-night with the nerveless sense of defeat, the hopeless feeling of sinking back forever into ugliness and commonness that he always had when he came home.
He specifically hates the ordinary food and the kitchen smells in his house. His dwelling place has no glitz, no sense of abundance or charm.
As far as his house is concerned, he is also specifically miserable because of the bathroom, with its "grimy zinc tub, the cracked mirror, the dripping spigots."
All in all, Paul is unhappy with his parents' lack of money and their threadbare attempts to look respectable. They keep their heads above water, but they have no lovely items to show for their lives.
Paul hates the ordinariness of life at his home on Cordelia Street.
It was a highly respectable street, where all the houses were exactly alike, and where business men of moderate means begot and reared large families of children, all of whom went to Sabbath-school and learned the shorter catechism, and were interested in arithmetic; all of whom were as exactly alike as their homes, and of a piece with the monotony in which they lived.
Everything at home seems drab, everyone and every house is similar to the next, and no one is interesting or different or bright. He dislikes how everyone does the same things, likes the same things, wants the same things, and lives the same boring lives. It feels defeating to him to even have to return to such a place, especially after one of his "orgies of living"—the times where he indulges in the experiences that he truly values and wants to have—because everything at home seems dull (instead of bright), muted (instead of musical), boring (instead of interesting), and monotonous (instead of thrilling and fast-paced).
Paul hates how provincial life at his home feels. Everything feels so cut off from the world, from culture, and from beauty. Home seems so "small-town" in comparison to his experiences in the city. For example,
On [the] last Sunday of November, Paul sat all the afternoon on the lowest step of his "stoop," staring into the street, while his sisters, in their rockers, were talking to the minister's daughters next door about how many shirt-waists they had made in the last week, and how many waffles some one had eaten at the last church supper. When the weather was warm, and his father was in a particularly jovial frame of mind, the girls made lemonade, which was always brought out in a red glass pitcher, ornamented with forget-me-nots in blue enamel. This the girls thought very fine . . .
The topics that concern Paul's family do not concern Paul at all. He doesn't care about shirt-waists made by his sisters or the number of waffles eaten by acquaintances. It does not feel like a highlight of his day to be served lemonade in the family pitcher, which his sisters think is so lovely. Paul has seen and heard true loveliness, and his family's ideas about beauty and happiness seem to irritate and depress him.
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