That drawing-room had been inaugurated by Fan, and yet it did not reflect her character in the slightest degree. It was a singularly colourless, pointless room, and Fan’s was not a colourless or pointless nature. Fan’s taste had been just so far educated as to have reached the chill circle of negation. She was able to reject with aversion the stuffy crowd of incongruous, inconsequent tables and chairs, the tawdry or glaring vulgarity of ornament in the houses of the wealthier tradespeople, and even of the condescending professional people of Friarton, with whom her visiting-list began and ended. Therefore there was none of the embarrassment of more than doubtful riches apt to distinguish third- or fourth-rate drawing-rooms in the room at Friarton Mill. There were no Berlin wool or bead monstrosities, no ‘table books’ overpoweringly gorgeous, like the Queen’s Lifeguards, in scarlet and gold bindings; no terrible specimens of art in water-colours or chalks, no china chimney vases painted coarsely in all the colours of the rainbow, and reckoned very handsome jars by their complacent possessors; no starched tangles of white cotton, crackling at every touch, on the backs of chairs and sofas, or on the faces of little tables, attaching themselves without permission to the collars of coats and the sleeves of gowns. Fan knew better than these attributes of half civilisation went, but her knowledge stopped short there, and only served to reveal her remaining amount of ignorance. And she was so afraid of compromising herself in her ignorance that she restricted herself as severely in her drawing-room as though she had been a social Puritan: she ventured on little or nothing beyond the absolutely necessary rosewood tables and cane seats of the simplest form, the carpet and hangings of the most subdued tint and pattern, the plain cottage piano with its heap of music, not in admired disorder, but in deliberate tidiness in the background,—the attenuated flower-glasses which would only hold the most attenuated bouquets. The one error which Fan had allowed herself to fall into, was still on the side of colourlessness and coldness. There was a large mirror over the plain white marble chimney-piece which reflected and intensified with a stony, topographical correctness the dim, meagre effect of the room. There could not have been a wider contrast between the interior and the world without, to which the room ought to have had an affinity, between the natural homeliness and affluence of sweet beauty and gaiety in the Friarton Mill surroundings, and the artificial vow of perpetual frigidity and austerity—according to which Fan’s drawing-room was arranged. ‘That drawing-room of Fan Constable’s is another version of the glacial theory,’ Mrs. Hilliard, the most privileged and liveliest woman in Friarton, used to declare, with a shrug of her shoulders and a real shiver. ‘It is the bondage to starvation of rising gentility.’