talk. We need no book of history to teach us this—we have only to observe the ample proportions of the arm-chairs of the period.

Our ancestors of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth centuries worked with a faith in the permanence of what they created. We have lost this happy confidence. We are occupied exclusively with preserving and reproducing. We have not succeeded in creating a style adapted to our modern life. It is just as well! Our life, with its haste, its nervousness and its preoccupations, does not inspire the furniture-makers. We cannot do better than to accept the standards of other times, and adapt them to our uses.

Why should we American woman run after styles and periods of which we know nothing? Why should we not be content with the fundamental things? The formal French room is very delightful in the proper place but when it is unsuited to the people who must live in it it is as bad as a sham room. The woman who wears paste jewels is not so conspicuously wrong as the woman who plasters herself with too many real jewels at the wrong time!

This is what I am always fighting in people's houses, the unsuitability of things. The foolish woman goes about from shop to shop and buys as her fancy directs. She sees something "pretty" and buys it, though it has no reference either in form or color to the scheme of her house. Haven't you been in rooms where there was a jumble of mission furniture, satinwood, fine old mahogany and gilt-legged chairs? And it is the same with color. A woman says, "Oh, I love blue, let's have blue!" regardless of the exposure of her room and the furnishings she has already collected. And then when she has treated each one of her rooms in a different color, and with a different floor covering, she wonders why she is always fretted in going from one room to another.

Don't go about the furnishing of your house with the idea that you must select the furniture of some one period and stick to that. It isn't at all necessary. There are old English chairs and tables of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries that fit into our quiet, spacious Twentieth Century country homes. Lines and fabrics and woods are the things to be compared.

There are so many beautiful things that have come to us from other times that it should be easy to make our homes beautiful, but I have seen what I can best describe as apoplectic chairs whose legs were fashioned like aquatic plants; tables upheld by tortured naked women; lighting fixtures in the form of tassels, and such horrors, in many houses of to-day under the guise of being "authentic period furniture." Only a connoisseur can ever hope to know about the furniture of every period, but all of us can easily learn the ear-marks of the furniture that is suited to our homes. I shan't talk about ear-marks here, however, because dozens of collectors have compiled excellent books that tell you all about curves and lines and grain-of-wood and worm-holes. My business is to persuade you to use your graceful French sofas and your simple rush bottom New England chairs in different rooms—in other words, to preach to you the beauty of suitability. Suitability! Suitability! SUITABILITY!!

It is such a relief to return to the tranquil, simple forms of furniture, and to decorate our rooms by a process of elimination. How many rooms have I not cleared of junk—this heterogeneous mass of ornamental "period" furniture and bric-a-brac bought to make a room "look cozy." Once cleared of these, the simplicity and dignity of the room comes back, the architectural spaces are freed and now stand in their proper relation to the furniture. In other words, the architecture of the room becomes its decoration.

III

THE OLD WASHINGTON IRVING HOUSE

I have always lived in enchanting houses. Probably when another woman would be dreaming of love affairs, I dream of the delightful houses I have lived in. And just as the woman who dreams of many lovers finds one dream a little dearer than all the rest, so one of my houses has been dearer to me than all the others.

THE WASHINGTON IRVING HOUSE WAS DELIGHTFULLY RAMBLING

This favorite love of mine is the old Washington Irving house in New York, the quaint mansion that gave historic Irving Place its name. For twenty years my friend, Elizabeth Marbury, and I made this old house our home. Two years ago we reluctantly gave up the old house and moved into a more modern one—also transformed from old into new—on East Fifty-fifth Street. We have also a delightful old house in France, the Villa Trianon, at Versailles, where we spend our summers. So you see we have had the rare experience of transforming three mistreated old houses into very delightful homes.

When we found this old house, so many years ago, we were very young, and it is amusing now to think of its evolution. We had so many dreams, so many theories, and we tried them all out on the old house. And like a patient, well-bred maiden aunt, the old house always accepted our changes most placidly. There never was such a house!

You could do anything to it, because, fundamentally, it was good. Its wall spaces were inviting, its windows were made for framing pleasant things. When we moved there we had a broad sweep of view: I can remember seeing the river from our dining-room. Now the city has grown up around the old house and jostled it rudely, and shut out much of its sunshine.

There is a joy in the opportunity of creating a beautiful interior for a new and up-to-date house, but best of all is the joy of furnishing an old house like this one. It is like reviving an old garden. It may not be just your idea of a garden to begin with, but as you study it and deck its barren spaces with masses of color, and fit a sundial into the spot that so needs it, and give the sunshine a fountain to play with, you love the old garden just a little more every time you touch it, until it becomes to you the most beautiful garden in all the world.

Gardens and houses are such whimsical things! This old house of ours had been so long mistreated that it was fairly petulant and querulous when I began studying it. It asked questions on every turn, and seemed surprised when they were answered. The house was delightfully rambling, with a tiny entrance hall, and narrow stairs, and sudden up and down steps from one room to another like the old, old house one associates with far-away places and old times.

The little entrance hall was worse than a question, it was a problem, but I finally solved it. The floor was paved with little hexagon-shaped tiles of a wonderful old red. A door made of little square panes of mirrors was placed where it would deceive the old hall into thinking itself a spacious thing. The walls were covered with a green-and-white-stripe wall-paper that looked as old as Rip Van Winkle. This is the same ribbon-grass paper that I afterward used in the Colony Club hallway. The woodwork was painted a soft gray-green. Finally, I had my collection of faded French costume prints set flat against the top of the wall as a frieze. The hall was so very narrow that as you went up stairs you could actually examine the old prints in detail. Another little thing: I covered the handrail of the stairs with a soft gray-green velvet of the same tone as the woodwork, and the effect was so very good and the touch of it so very nice that many of my friends straightway adopted the idea.

But I am placing the cart before the horse! I should talk of the shell of the house before the