=THE DINING-ROOM=

It is scarcely necessary to point out that the bigger and more ambitious the house, the more perfect its appointments must be.  If your house has a great Georgian dining-room, the table should be set with Georgian or an earlier period English silver.  Furthermore, in a “great” dining-room, all the silver should be real!  “Real” meaning nothing so trifling as “sterling,” but genuine and important “period” pieces made by Eighteenth Century silversmiths, such as de Lamerie or Crespell or Buck or Robertson, or perhaps one of their predecessors.  Or if, like Mrs. Oldname, you live in an old Colonial house, you are perhaps also lucky enough to have inherited some genuine American pieces made by Daniel Rogers or Paul Revere!  Or if you are an ardent admirer of Early Italian architecture and have built yourself a Fifteenth Century stone-floored and frescoed or tapestry-hung dining room, you must set your long refectory table with a “runner” of old hand-linen and altar embroidery, or perhaps Thirteenth Century damask and great cisterns or ewers and beakers in high-relief silver and gold; or in Callazzioli or majolica, with great bowls of fruit and church candlesticks of gilt, and even follow as far as is practicable the crude table implements of that time.  It need not be pointed out that Twentieth Century appurtenances in a Thirteenth or Fifteenth Century room are anachronisms.  But because the dining-table in the replica of a palace (whether English, Italian, Spanish or French) may be equipped with great “standing cups” and candelabra so heavy a man can scarcely lift one, it does not follow that all the rest of us who live in medium or small houses, should attempt anything of the sort.  Nothing could be more out of proportion—­and therefore in worse taste.  Nor is it necessary, in order to have a table that is inviting, to set it with any of the completely exquisite things which all people of taste long for, but which are possessed (in quantity at least) only through wealth, inheritance, or “collector’s luck.”

=A PLEASING DINING-ROOM AT LIMITED COST=

Enchanting dining-rooms and tables have been achieved with an outlay amounting to comparatively nothing.

There is a dining-room in a certain small New York house that is quite as inviting as it is lacking in expensiveness.  Its walls are rough-plastered “French gray.”  Its table is an ordinary drop-leaf kitchen one painted a light green that is almost gray; the chairs are wooden ones, somewhat on the Windsor variety, but made of pine and painted like the table, and the side tables or consoles are made of a cheap round pine table which has been sawed in half, painted gray-green, and the legless sides fastened to the walls.  The glass curtains are point d’esprit net with a deep flounce at the bottom and outside curtains are (expensive) watermelon pink changeable taffeta.  There is a gilt mirror over a cream (absolutely plain) mantel and over each console a picture of a