“A little notice tells you the price of the room, and you gather the price is doubled if you do not leave the toilet as you find it.  Beside the bed, and to be lit at night by a handy switch over the pillow, is a little clock, its face flush with the wall [no dust-catcher].

“The room has no corners to gather dirt, wall meets floor with a gentle curve, and the apartment could be swept out effectually by a few strokes of a mechanical sweeper [sucked out by the now-used cleaning-machine.—­Author].  The door-frames and window-frames are of metal, rounded and impervious to draft.  You are politely requested to turn a handle at the foot of your bed before leaving the room, and forthwith the frame turns up into a vertical position, and the bedclothes hang airing.  You stand in the doorway and realize that there remains not a minute’s work for any one to do.  Memories of the fetid disorder of many an earthly bedroom after a night’s use float across your mind.

[In America the use of the sleeping-room as a sitting-room is more common than in England, and the fetid disorder is far greater.]

“And you must not imagine this dustless, spotless, sweet apartment as anything but beautiful.  Its appearance is a little unfamiliar, of course, but all the muddle of dust-collecting hangings and witless ornament that cover the earthly bedroom, the valances, the curtains to check the draft from the ill-fitting windows, the worthless irrelevant pictures, usually a little askew, the dusty carpets, and all the paraphernalia about the dirty black-leaded fireplace are gone.  The faintly tinted walls are framed with just one clear colored line, as finely placed as the member of a Greek capital; the door-handles and the lines of the panels of the door, the two chairs, the framework of the bed, the writing-table, have all that exquisite finish of contour that is begotten of sustained artistic effort.  The graciously shaped windows each frame a picture—­since they are draughtless the window-seats are no mere mockeries as are the window-seats of earth—­and on the sill the sole thing to need attention in the room is one little bowl of blue Alpine flowers.”

The true office of the house is not only to be useful, but to be aesthetically a background for the dwellers therein, subordinate to them, not obtrusive.  In most of our modern building and furnishing the people are relegated to the background as insignificant figures.  This is largely why the home feeling is absent, why children do not form an affection for the rooms they live in.

Let there be nothing in the room because some other person has it; this shows poverty of ideas.  Let there be nothing in the room which does not satisfy some need, spiritual or physical, of some member of the family.  How bare our rooms would become!  Let the skeptical reader try an experiment.  Take everything out of a given room, then bring back one by one the things one feels essential not merely because it fills space but for the presence of which some one can give a good and sufficient reason.  It will mean a trial of a few days, because it is not easy to separate habit from need.  A table has stood in a certain spot:  that is no reason in itself why it should continue to stand there unless it supplies a need.