She never had her own way in anything that I can remember. The house never represented her. The furniture was leathern and velvet and stout-looking, the kind of furniture which seems to aim at being more or less exact moulds of the forms of middle-aged men. The armchairs were like commodious hip-baths in plush. Aunt Emmy and I were lost in them. I remember once walking as a child through the wilderness of armchairs at Maple's and thinking they all looked like Uncle Tom. A good deal of Utrecht velvet had gone to the upholstering of that house in Pembridge Square. It was comfortable, airless, flowerless, with gravy-coloured walls. As I grew older I wondered why it was all so ugly and dreary. But I found there were less means than I had supposed, and though the cooking remained excellent, flowers and new chintzes were dispensed with as unnecessary. Aunt Emmy opened a window surreptitiously now and then, but Uncle Thomas and Uncle Tom hated draughts, and they did not get off to sleep so quickly after dinner if the drawing-room had been aired during the meal. The dining-room windows were never opened at all, except when Uncle Thomas was too unwell to come in and Uncle Tom was away. Many men had wished to marry Aunt Emmy; not only sedentary professional men in long frock-coats, full to the brim of the best food, like Uncle Tom; but nice, lean, hungry-looking, open-air men who were majors, or country squires, or something interesting of that kind, whose clothes sat well on them, and who drew up in the Row on little skittish, curveting polo-ponies when Aunt Emmy and I walked there. I once asked her, after a certain good-looking Major Stoddart had ridden on, why she did not marry, but she only said reprovingly, with great dignity: "You don't understand such matters, my dear, or you would know that I could not possibly leave your Uncle Thomas." I was silenced. I felt with bitterness that this could not be her whole reason for celibacy, but that, owing to the purely superficial fact that my hair was still in a pigtail, she supposed I was unable to comprehend "lots of things" that I felt I understood perfectly, and on which my mind was already working with an energy which would have surprised her had she guessed it. By this time I worshipped Aunt Emmy, who represented in my somewhat colourless orphaned existence the beautiful and romantic side of life. Aunt Emmy looked romantic, and the contrast between her refined, gentle self-effacement and the commonplace egotism of her two men was of the glaring nature which appeals to a young girl's imagination. I never forgot Major Stoddart, and when I was eighteen, and had left school and was living in Pembridge Square, I had the good fortune to come in for the remains of a scene between Aunt Emmy and Uncle Tom--the very day after I had turned up my hair.