The planning and talking over the arrangement of this room will be a great amusement both to mother and daughter, and I strongly recommend the mother to attempt nothing in the way of a surprise, but to frankly take her daughter into her confidence and consult her tastes on the subject if she wishes the room to be a real success. I am compelled to recommend this course from an experience of my own, because I have never forgotten my unconcealable dismay at returning home after a long visit to find my own mother had planned such a surprise for me, but had in all innocence, and with such kindness, done such dreadful things to my pet belongings that I often recall the remembrance of my start of horror and exclamation of dismay with the profoundest contrition, for I did not know then what I have only realised in after years, that I must have pained her dreadfully, for, dear soul, she had done all the renovations out of her own savings, and had taken much trouble and pains about it, and I could not help saying, ‘Oh, why did you let them do this?’ before I realised that this was a surprise, and I ought to have been enchanted instead of dismayed at her renovations--renovations that were in absolute good taste, for her taste was perfect, and her house charming long before anyone else cared for their house, but which somehow were not my ideas, and which annoyed me dreadfully because the arrangements were not mine at all, and which I never dared alter afterwards, because I had already received the changes so ungraciously, instead of realising that I should have been enchanted with the forethought and goodness which had prepared all this for me. Remembering my own reception of a similar surprise, therefore advise that the daughter should be consulted in every way about the room she is to inhabit, unless, of course, she has no tastes of her own, and does not care what the room looks like so long as she has it to herself; then the room can be made as pretty as the mother likes. But there are few girls nowadays who do not care for their rooms, and are not as eager as anyone else to make themselves a pretty nest that they may regard as their own, and not as a perch on which they rest on sufferance until they are pushed out by the on-coming juniors into the arms of the first man who appears in the least degree anxious to have her for a wife.