Be very careful though.  Do not mistake modern eccentricities for “art.”  There are frightful things in vogue to-day—­flamboyant colors, grotesque, triangular and oblique designs that can not possibly be other than bad, because aside from striking novelty, there is nothing good about them.  By no standard can a room be in good taste that looks like a perfume manufacturer’s phantasy or a design reflected in one of the distorting mirrors that are mirth-provokers at county fairs.

=TO DETERMINE AN OBJECT’S WORTH=

In buying an article for a house one might formulate for oneself a few test questions: 

First, is it useful?  Anything that is really useful has a reason for existence.

Second, has it really beauty of form and line and color?

(Texture is not so important.) Or is it merely striking, or amusing?

Third, is it entirely suitable for the position it occupies?

Fourth, if it were eliminated would it be missed?  Would something else look as well or better, in its place?  Or would its place look as well empty?  A truthful answer to these questions would at least help in determining its value, since an article that failed in any of them could not be “perfect.”

Fashion affects taste—­it is bound to.  We abominate Louis the Fourteenth and Empire styles at the moment, because curves and super-ornamentation are out of fashion; whether they are really bad or not, time alone can tell.  At present we are admiring plain silver and are perhaps exacting that it be too plain?  The only safe measure of what is good, is to choose that which has best endured.  The “King” and the “Fiddle” pattern for flat silver, have both been in use in houses of highest fashion ever since they were designed, so that they, among others, must have merit to have so long endured.

In the same way examples of old potteries and china and glass, at present being reproduced, are very likely good, because after having been for a century or more in disuse, they are again being chosen.  Perhaps one might say that the “second choice” is “proof of excellence.”

=SERVICE=

The subject of furnishings is however the least part of this chapter—­appointments meaning decoration being of less importance (since this is not a book on architecture or decoration!), than appointments meaning service.

But before going into the various details of service, it might be a good moment to speak of the unreasoning indignity cast upon the honorable vocation of a servant.

There is an inexplicable tendency, in this country only, for working people in general to look upon domestic service as an unworthy, if not altogether degrading vocation.  The cause may perhaps be found in the fact that this same scorning public having for the most part little opportunity to know high-class servants, who are to be found only in high-class families, take it for granted that ignorant “servant girls”