The East room, as it had been called
ever since Maria Bertram was sixteen, was now considered Fanny's,
almost as decidedly as the white attic: the smallness of the one
making the use of the other so evidently reasonable that the Miss
Bertrams, with every superiority in their own apartments which their
own sense of superiority could demand, were entirely approving it; and
Mrs. Norris, having stipulated for there never being a fire in it on
Fanny's account, was tolerably resigned to her having the use of what
nobody else wanted, though the terms in which she sometimes spoke of
the indulgence seemed to imply that it was the best room in the house.

The aspect was so favourable that even without a fire it was habitable
in many an early spring and late autumn morning to such a willing mind
as Fanny's; and while there was a gleam of sunshine she hoped not to be
driven from it entirely, even when winter came. The comfort of it in
her hours of leisure was extreme. She could go there after anything
unpleasant below, and find immediate consolation in some pursuit, or
some train of thought at hand. Her plants, her books--of which she
had been a collector from the first hour of her commanding a
shilling--her writing-desk, and her works of charity and ingenuity,
were all within her reach; or if indisposed for employment, if nothing
but musing would do, she could scarcely see an object in that room
which had not an interesting remembrance connected with it. Everything
was a friend, or bore her thoughts to a friend; and though there had
been sometimes much of suffering to her; though her motives had often
been misunderstood, her feelings disregarded, and her comprehension
undervalued; though she had known the pains of tyranny, of ridicule,
and neglect, yet almost every recurrence of either had led to something
consolatory: her aunt Bertram had spoken for her, or Miss Lee had been
encouraging, or, what was yet more frequent or more dear, Edmund had
been her champion and her friend: he had supported her cause or
explained her meaning, he had told her not to cry, or had given her
some proof of affection which made her tears delightful; and the whole
was now so blended together, so harmonised by distance, that every
former affliction had its charm. The room was most dear to her, and
she would not have changed its furniture for the handsomest in the
house, though what had been originally plain had suffered all the
ill-usage of children; and its greatest elegancies and ornaments were a
faded footstool of Julia's work, too ill done for the drawing-room,
three transparencies, made in a rage for transparencies, for the three
lower panes of one window, where Tintern Abbey held its station between
a cave in Italy and a moonlight lake in Cumberland, a collection of
family profiles, thought unworthy of being anywhere else, over the
mantelpiece, and by their side, and pinned against the wall, a small
sketch of a ship sent four years ago from the Mediterranean by William,
with H.M.S. Antwerp at the bottom, in letters as tall as the mainmast.