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.