As we are thus brought to the consideration of students' rooms, I might mention a line of progress initiated by the students themselves, and afterwards followed up by the authorities. In early days a separate study for each student had not been contemplated. This is another difference between Newnham and Girton, since, in the latter College, the collegiate idea had been more prominent from the first, and each Girton student had her bedroom and sitting-room, however small. In the first abode of Miss Clough and her five students all slept in _bona fide_ bedrooms and worked sitting round a common table. In the early Newnham Hall more arrangement was made for privacy in study. Each student had her little writing table and sufficient book-shelves in her room. But the common sitting-rooms were used for most of the day, and not many rooms occupied by individual students were suitable for receiving company. Even little tea-parties among the students were of a very picnicky character. But when the ambition of the students was set on making a study-bedroom into a study first and a bedroom in a very secondary place, ingenuity provided facilities. Although the matter may seem _infiniment petit_, I consider that among Newnham pioneers the two students who accomplished this revolution should hold a place. One of them bought a large piece of chintz, and undisturbed by the jests of some of her comrades and the amused criticism of Miss Clough, devised a covering for bedstead, chest of drawers and other pieces of bedroom furniture. The other, of more definitely artistic taste (it was in the days of "Patience" and of the so-called _aesthetic_ movement for soft colours and flowing lines) procured a piece of sage-green cloth or cretonne, and effected a similar revolution. Already in the large corner rooms something like a cubicle arrangement had been devised. The evident preference of the students for harmoniously, if simply, furnished rooms and for the preponderance of the idea of study over that of mere rest was followed out in furnishing new rooms as they were required. Old oak hutches, bureaux, the drawers of which might hold clothes, bed-coverings of a character suitable to that of the room, also pretty wall-papers of the kind Morris had lately invented, were procured for the students generally. Thus students came to take more pleasure in their rooms, into which they could invite one another, and sometimes friends from outside, though the common sitting-rooms were still the usual place for receiving guests. I think I am not wrong in saying that Newnham here started a practice subsequently followed in almost all houses of residence for women students. Certainly the first head of Somerville, when visiting Miss Clough, showed interest in the study-bedroom system. The desire to make the one room assert its diurnal rather than its nocturnal character was not new. Dickens had already ridiculed it in describing the "rooms" of Dick Swiveller.