So, as might be expected from the glance at the garden on entering, the room was very dreary, uninviting and colourless. The dingy library in the London house where we first met Marion was charming in comparison, for it, though dull and gloomy, always looked warm and comfortable, which was far from being the case with Miss Tremlett’s drawing-room. In the literal sense it was not cold, for winter and summer, spring and autumn, it was kept at an equal temperature by all means of tiresome inventions—patents most of them—self-adjusting ventilators and equalising stoves, pipes with hot air and pipes with cold, on which the credulous lady spent a small fortune in the course of each year. Still it always looked cold. It was so oppressively grey—drab rather. So obtrusively neutral, if such an expression be permissible; that one almost felt as if the most glaring mixture of colours would be preferable! I wonder, by the way, whence has arisen the notion so common to people of very small taste or no taste at all, that so long as they stick to greys and drabs and slate colour, they are perfectly unimpregnable, however terribly they may mingle the shades, or, which is almost as bad, distress more sensitive organizations by unbroken monotony of dingy gloom. “I must say I like quiet colours,” you will hear said with a self-satisfied smile by the most hopelessly commonplace and least educated of your acquaintance. “Quiet colours!” Just as well, my dear Madam, might you be proud of being stone deaf or lame of one leg, as of your incapability of admiring one of the most exquisite of our material gifts, that of colour. A pity truly that you and others of your refined tastes had not a hand in the arrangement of things in general; this world for instance, how very much more tasteful and less “vulgar” it would have been, had it been left to your unexceptionable greys and drabs! Not that greys and drabs are not good in their place, beautiful even, as a background to more vivid hues, a repose to the eye after the luxury of greens and blues and scarlets, which nature has the bad taste to love and cherish so fondly. But only fancy a whole world of greys and drabs! Oh, intensity of blue sky; oh, fields of emerald green; flowers of every conceivable perfection of colour; from deepest, richest, crimson, through golden gleams, to faintest blush of rose; oh, beautiful bright radiant things, what a dreary, ugly world this would be without you! But we, being more refined, in our tastes, some of us, prefer “quiet colours” as we call them. Rather I think, would I endure the agony of Mrs. Butcher’s Sunday bonnet before me in church, a perfect mass of utterly unassorted reds and greens and yellows, but in its way an innocent, “vulgar” barbaric expression of delight, untutored and, spontaneous, in the colour-beauty so profusely bestowed; rather I think this, than the other extreme, of cold, presumptuous scorn of this great gift, which results—In what? In