“Not if it was a _birthday_ present”--how unfair, to call it a birthday present, rightfully due, and in addition to censure it as a luxury. They wouldn’t have called a new tennis racquet a luxury every time she played with it.... Oh, didn’t they--couldn’t they--see? They ceded her the five hundredweight of coal, but tempered the generosity by making “Ursula’s coal” the current family joke. Hal, with a great shout of laughter, suggested a poker as his birthday present--and was surprised when the offer was promptly accepted. Up came William and Lottie, then, on the morning of October the fourteenth, with two dozen penny bundles of sticks--their gift! Would she deign to accept it? Ursula was very grateful. After that, of course, everything in existence was offered her for her fire, from an empty reel of cotton to a broken umbrella. Bunny pretended to be in awe of his sister, as a fire-worshipper, and read up their rites and practices in the Encyclopædia in order to taunt her with them at the public table. Also he would ask her every breakfast-time if she had counted her five hundredweight, insisting that he had heard a burglar stealing along her passage during the night--“And you bet he was after a lump of your coal, Ursula!” Grace wondered if it was quite safe: “Ursula’s such a scatter-brain. She might easily go to sleep and leave it burning, mightn’t she?” thinking of her two babies in the house. And Nina, by calling her “Cinders,” imagined she had thus said the final word on the matter. But: “My own room and my own fire”--the last word was surely with Ursula. To be able to choose the mood and the moment for a fire; to say: “Now--and exactly now” without waiting for a grown-up to order it and a servant to light it; to be its supreme mistress, poke it when she pleased, draw her small basket-work armchair as near as she wanted it, dole out her coal, so that each piece should yield its utmost; and when it sank to a luminous twitching landscape of caves and archways, then to pull the faded red-serge curtains across her window, still with that consciously imperious feeling, tuck the four walls of her room warmly around her, and the dim ceiling with its waves of orange reflected above the fireplace, and the boarded floor.... Then--just to sit there and exult! Exult _at_ something ... the bumping, congested, ricochetting life in the rest of the house, perhaps--“like billiard-balls making cannons all the time,” Ursula once phrased it to herself.