“See,” he said, indicating a great brass bowl of perennial sunflowers on the landing, “your favourite flower!” “My favourite flower?” “You said it was—in that book. Perennial sunflower.” She was perplexed and then remembered. She understood now why he had said downstairs, when she had glanced at a big photographic enlargement of a portrait of Doctor Barnardo, “your favourite hero in real life.” He had brought her at Hythe one day a popular Victorian device, a confession album, in which she had had to write down on a neat rose-tinted page, her favourite author, her favourite flower, her favourite colour, her favourite hero in real life, her “pet aversion,” and quite a number of such particulars of her subjective existence. She had filled this page in a haphazard manner late one night, and she was disconcerted to find how thoroughly her careless replies had come home to roost. She had put down “pink” as her favourite colour because the page she was writing upon suggested it, and the paper of the room was pale pink, the curtains strong pink with a pattern of paler pink and tied with large pink bows, and the lamp shades, the bedspread, the pillow-cases, the carpet, the chairs, the very crockery—everything but the omnipresent perennial sunflowers—was pink. Confronted with this realization, she understood that pink was the least agreeable of all possible hues for a bedroom. She perceived she had to live now in a chromatic range between rather underdone mutton and salmon. She had said that her favourite musical composers were Bach and Beethoven; she really meant it, and a bust of Beethoven materialized that statement, but she had made Doctor Barnardo her favourite hero in real life because his name also began with a B and she had heard someone say somewhere that he was a very good man. The predominance of George Eliot’s pensive rather than delightful countenance in her bedroom and the array of all that lady’s works in a lusciously tooled pink leather, was due to her equally reckless choice of a favourite author. She had said too that Nelson was her favourite historical character, but Sir Isaac with a delicate jealousy had preferred to have this heroic but regrettably immoral personality represented in his home only by an engraving of the Battle of Copenhagen.... She stood surveying this room, and her husband watched her eagerly. She was, he felt, impressed at last!... Certainly she had never seen such a bedroom in her life. By comparison even with the largest of the hotel apartments they had occupied it was vast; it had writing-tables and a dainty bookcase and a blushing sofa, and dressing-tables and a bureau and a rose-red screen and three large windows. Her thoughts went back to the narrow little bedroom at Penge with which she had hitherto been so entirely content. Her own few little books, a photograph or so,—they’d never dare to come here, even if she dared to bring them.