Familiar things.... The tiny grate, in which she had not yet lit her first triumphantly solitary fire; a framed coloured picture, on the wall, of pierrots and a vivid blue background and balloons that were balls of gold fire; very popular for four-and-sixpence in the picture-shops at the time; and very popular with the flappers of a period grown beyond “Sir Galahad” and Burne-Jones, and far indeed beyond “The Souls Awakening,” to a taste that was “quaint” and “whimsical” or sometimes (proudly) “barbaric.” Ursula, in her barbaric phase, had hung over the mantlepiece a necklace of beads and shark’s teeth once given to her by Aunt Lavvy, who had known a missionary. The pierrot picture and the beads and the fireplace represented to her the supreme gems of the room. The rag-mat on the linoleum was faded, and the other mat, near the door, did not match it. The wallpaper merely covered the wall with a yellowish-brown effect, and the chintz on the one rickety basket-chair was dim; the cushion a crewel-work relic. The white lumpy spread had been carefully turned back over the iron bedposts. The blind was awry, and showed, beyond the window, a corner of wall and a cistern belonging to the house beside the Laburnums. Warm red stuff curtains which Ursula rather liked, and a light wood dressing-table and washstand which she would have hated had they not also been, like everything else in the room, emphatically hers,--these, with another curtain run on a rod across the bulging corner, behind which were her dresses, completed the actual furnishings. She had coaxed Hal to fix up a shelf for her books--about a couple of dozen, with none of the battered look to them which indicates an owner who is also a lover. Indeed, Ursula valued them more because their rich, cosy appearance covered part of the wall, than for their contents. She treasured far more intimately the lumps and sticks of coloured sealing-wax, gold and lilac and black and emerald-green, and the squat seal, stamped with a “U,” which, with her ink-bottle, lay on the small bamboo table. Also the blue pottery jug on the mantleshelf, holding its bright spread of autumn leaves. How can one explain the magic of enjoyed loneliness which made each object in the room, the room itself, the shape of it, and the door that kept it apart from the rest of the house, and the view contained in the window, precious and significant to the little girl, sitting up in the bed? A single bedroom can hold a thousand different dreams--a double bedroom only one reality. And so we imagine wide-eyed sixteen in an obviously appropriate setting of spotless white walls and rosebud cretonne; with a deep-cushion window-seat, and a view of the sea and moonlight, or a wild-cherry tree in bloom.