One of Euphemia’s brightest ideas was to burn wood.  Logs make even a picturesque pile in a corner—­look “uncommon.”  But there are objections to wood.  Wood finely divided burns with gay quirks and jets of flame, and making cheerful crackling noises the while; but its warmth and brightness are as evanescent as love’s young dream.  And your solid log has a certain irritating inertness.  It is an absentee fuel, spending its fire up the chimney, and after its youthful clouds of glory turns but a cheerless side of black and white char towards the room.  And, above all, the marital mind is strangely exasperated by the log.  Smite it with the poker, and you get but a sullen resonance, a flight of red sparks, a sense of an unconquerable toughness.  It is worse than coke.  The crisp fracture of coal, the spitting flames suddenly leaping into existence from the shiny new fissures, are altogether wanting.  Old-seasoned timber burns indeed most delightfully, but then it is as ugly as coal, and withal very dear.  So Euphemia went back to coal again with a sigh.  Possibly if Euphemia had been surrounded by the wealth she deserves this trouble would not have arisen.  A silent servant, bearing the due dose of fresh fuel, would have come gliding from a mysterious Beneath, restored the waning animation of the grate, and vanished noiselessly again.  But this was beyond the range of Euphemia’s possibilities.  And so we are face to face with this problem of the scuttle again.

At first she would feign there was no such thing as coal.  It was too horrible.  Only a Zola would admit it.  It was the epoch of concealment.  The thing purchased was like a little cupboard on four legs; it might have held any convenient trifle; and there was a shelf upon the top and a book of poetry and a piece of crackled Satsuma.  You took a little brass handle and pulled it down, and the front of the little cupboard came forward, and there you found your coal.  But a dainty little cupboard can no more entertain black coal and inelegant firewood and keep its daintiness than a mind can entertain black thoughts and yet be sweet.  This cabinet became demoralised with amazing quickness; it became incontinent with its corruptions, a hinge got twisted, and after a time it acquired the habit of suddenly, and with an unpleasant oscillatory laughing noise, opening of its own accord and proclaiming its horrid secret to Euphemia’s best visitors.  An air of wickedness, at once precocious and senile, came upon it; it gaped and leered at Euphemia as the partner of her secret with such a familiar air of “I and you” that she could stand it no longer, and this depraved piece of furniture was banished at last from her presence, and relegated to its proper sphere of sham gentility below stairs, where it easily passed itself upon the cook as an exquisite.  Euphemia tried to be sensible then, and determined, since she must have coal in her room, to let no false modesty intervene, but to openly proclaim its presence to all the world.