of coolness, are so evident.  The walls and ceiling are a deep, flat cream, and the floor is laid in large black and white marble tiles.  Exactly opposite you as you enter, there is a wall fountain with a background of mirrors.  The water spills over from the fountain into ferns and flowers banked within a marble curb.  The two wall spaces on your right and left are broken by graceful niches which hold old statues.  An oval Chinese rug and the white and orange flowers of the fountain furnish the necessary color.  The windows flanking the entrance doorway are hung with flat curtains of coarse white linen, with inserts of old filet lace, and there are side curtains of dead black silk with borderings of silver and gold threads.

In any house that I have anything to do with, there is some sort of desk or table for writing in the hall.  How often I have been in other people’s houses when it was necessary to send a message, or to record an address, when the whole household began scurrying around trying to find a pencil and paper!  This, to my mind, is an outward and visible sign of an inward—­and fundamental!—­lack of order.

[Illustration:  THE FORECOURT AND ENTRANCE OF THE FIFTY-FIFTH STREET HOUSE]

In this hall there is a charming desk particularly adapted to its place.  It is a standing desk which can be lowered or heightened at will, so that one who wishes to scribble a line or so may use it without sitting down.  This desk is called a bureau d’architect.  I found it in Biarritz.  It would be quite easy to have one made by a good cabinet-maker, for the lines and method of construction are simple.  My hall desk is so placed that it is lighted by the window by day and the wall lights by night, but it might be lighted by two tall candlesticks if a wall light were not available.  There is a shallow drawer which contains surplus writing materials, but the only things permitted on the writing surface of the desk are the tray for cards, the pad and pencils.

The only other furniture in the hall is an old porter’s chair near the door, a chair that suggests the sedan of old France, but serves its purpose admirably.

A glass door leads to the inner hall and the stairway, which I consider the best thing in the house.  Instead of the usual steep and gloomy stairs with which we are all familiar, here is a graceful spiral stairway which runs from this floor to the roof.  The stair hall has two walls made up of mirrors in the French fashion, that is, cut in squares and held in place by small rosettes of gilt, and these mirrored walls seemingly double the spaciousness of what would be, under ordinary conditions, a gloomy inside hallway.

The house is narrow in the extreme, and the secret of its successful renaissance is plenty of windows and light color and mirrors—­mirrors—­mirrors!  It has been called the “Little House of Many Mirrors,” for so much of its spaciousness and charm is the effect of skilfully managed reflections.  The stair-landings are most ingeniously planned.  There are landings that lead directly from the stairs into the rooms of each floor, and back of one of the mirrored stair walls there is a little balcony connecting the rooms on that floor, a private passageway.