_May 28th. Evening_.

It's very funny here, but quite comfortable. You needn't give a
thought to my comforts, mother darling. There's a lot to eat, and if
I'm not in clover I'm certainly in feathers,--you should see the
immense sackful of them in a dark red sateen bag on my bed! As you
have been in Germany trying to get poor Dad well in all those
_Kurorten_, you'll understand how queer my bedroom looks, like a very
solemn and gloomy drawingroom into which it has suddenly occurred to
somebody to put a bed. It is a tall room: tall of ceiling, which is
painted at the corners with blue clouds and pink cherubim--unmistakable
Germans--and tall of door, of which there are three, and tall of
window, of which there are two. The windows have long dark curtains of
rep or something woolly, and long coffee-coloured lace curtains as
well; and there's a big green majolica stove in one corner; and there's
a dark brown wall-paper with gilt flowers on it; and an elaborate
chandelier hanging from a coloured plaster rosette in the middle of the
ceiling, all twisty and gilt, but it doesn't light,--Wanda, the maid of
all work, brings me a petroleum lamp with a green glass shade to it
when it gets dusk. I've got a very short bed with a dark red sateen
quilt on to which my sheet is buttoned a11 round, a pillow propped up
so high on a wedge stuck under the mattress that I shall sleep sitting
up almost straight, and then as a crowning glory the sack of feathers,
which will do beautifully for holding me down when I'm having a
nightmare. In a corner, with an even greater air of being an
afterthought than the bed, there's a very tiny washstand, and pinned on
the wall behind it over the part of the wallpaper I might splash on
Sunday mornings when I'm supposed really to wash, is a strip of grey
linen with a motto worked on it in blue wool: