Dear Fred:  “Everybody has them!” What a monstrous load of iniquity and nonsense that scape-goat has to carry!  Everybody wears tight boots and bustles and chignons and stove-pipe hats.  Everybody smokes and brags, and cheats in trade, not to mention a host of other abominations that can give only this excuse for their being:  they are common to a few millions of people who have not learned to declare a reason for the faith that is in them or the works that grow out of them.

Let us take time to consider this sliding-door question,—­folding-doors they used to be, and, truly, I’m not sure that the rollers are any improvement on the hinges,—­there is something dreadfully barny about sliding-doors.  Why do you want either?  You have one room which you call the parlor, supposed to be the best in the house, as to its location, its finish, its furniture, and its use.  Three of its walls are handsomely frescoed, curtained, and decorated with pictures or other ornaments; the fourth is one huge barricade of panel-work.  When the two parts are closed you have a constant fancy of rheumatic currents stealing through the cracks, and an ever-present fear lest they should suddenly fly open with “impetuous recoil, grating harsh thunder” on their wheels, and not exactly letting Satan in, but everything in the room fall out; an idle fear, for they can only be shoved asunder by dint of much pushing and pulling, especially if they are warped by having one side exposed to more heat than the other, as usually happens.  Being at last opened by hook or crook, another room is revealed, commonly smaller, more shabby in appearance, a sort of poor-relation attachment, spoiling the completeness and artistic unity of the larger one.  By care you may avoid something of this; if you follow the fashion, you will have the most of it.  When the two rooms are twins, alike in every respect, they are really one large room, fitted up, for economical reasons, with a movable screen in the centre, by means of which you may warm (excepting rheumatic currents as above) and use one half at a time.  But call things by their right names.  Don’t talk grandly about your two parlors when you mean two halves of one.  Have wide doors, by all means, not only between rooms but into main hall,—­four, six, or eight feet, if the rooms are so wide and high that they shall not be disproportionately large.  Then, if you must have the whole broadside of sliding or folding doors, let the two rooms thus connected be of different styles but equal richness,—­different, that they shall not seem one room cut in two,—­peers, that one shall not shame and cheapen the other.

Doors are a great bother, at best.  I wish they could be abolished.  They are always slamming, punching holes in the plastering with their knobs, creaking on their hinges, bruising the piano, pinching babies’ fingers, and making old folks see stars when they get up in the night to look for burglars.  Heavy curtains are infinitely more graceful, equally warm, and not half so stubbornly unmanageable.  Then think of entering a room.  By her steps the goddess is revealed; but who can walk like a goddess while forcing an entrance between two sliding-doors, maybe wedging fast half-way through?  How different from passing in quiet dignity beneath the rich folds of overhanging drapery!  But I suppose we must leave all that to the Orientals, at present.