But up here, in her room, was refuge and loneliness and space. Ursula’s grateful love for her room at that moment was so extreme that she longed to express it. It looked chilly and grey with the drops of rain dripping down the window, and falling dankly from the opposite drain-pipe of the next-door house. She suddenly determined that this was the moment for her first fire, her first _possession_ of a fire. She would put it off no longer. From the little cupboard she brought sticks and newspaper and some small lumps of coal. It was a very tiny grate, and quite soon it was alight, with an exciting crackle of wood and spurts of flame.... Ursula crouched down in front of it, in dreamy ecstasy. Her gaze roamed about the familiar objects, so as to become acquainted with them in their new shimmer and glow. She sprang up and twitched the red curtains across the window, shutting out the disappointing wall beyond ... you could so easily dream a perfect view, with the curtains drawn, and the room bewitched by warm flame. In future nights she would lie in bed hearing the red embers creak and flop, and more than ever she would be herself, owning herself, gravely exultant in self-possession.... Perhaps Mother and Father might give her for Christmas a small round clock-creature with a small round face and no hair--but friendly. And then time would be privately hers, too, as well as space. For now she shared time with everybody else who could hear the striking hours from the big clock in the hall. When the Maxwells stayed on the river near Cookham for one summer holiday, Ursula nosed about until she found a willow tree up a back-water, where the branches swept round her boat like a tent and enclosed it. When they went, as they usually did, to the seaside, she would discover for herself special places on the leeside of a deserted breakwater, or between hedge and tree-trunk in a corner of a field. Wherever she could find an equivalent for the room, she was happy. It was her funny instinct (and certain small animals have it, too) to burrow and squirm her way into some hedged-in space, and curl up with a sigh of content, naming it hers. Her romantic sense of property was, maybe, over-developed from the edged contrast of life in a family where the sense of property barely existed at all, and who only in a crisis, and then but dimly, felt the need for more room. In everything else she was more or less like the other Maxwells.