of the room.  This is a most daring assumption, because there are so many feeble and threatening ceilings overhanging most of us that good ones seem rare.  But the ceiling is an architectural problem, and you must consider it in the beginning of things.  It may be beamed and have every evidence of structural beauty and strength, or it may be beamed in a ridiculous fashion that advertises the beams as shams, leading from nowhere to nowhere.  It may be a beautiful expanse of creamy modeled plaster resting on a distinguished cornice, or it may be one of those ghastly skim-milk ceilings with distorted cupids and roses in relief.  It may be a rectangle of plain plaster tinted cream or pale yellow or gray, and keeping its place serenely, or it may be a villainous stretch of ox-blood, hanging over your head like the curse of Cain.  There are hundreds of magnificent painted ceilings, and vaulted arches of marble and gold, but these are not of immediate importance to the woman who is furnishing a small house, and are not within the scope of this book.  So let us exercise common sense and face our especial ceiling problem in an architectural spirit.  If your house has structural beams, leave them exposed, if you like, but treat them as beams; stain them, and wax them, and color the spaces between them cream or tan or warm gray, and then make the room beneath the beams strong enough in color and furnishings to carry the impressive ceiling.

If you have an architect who is also a decorator, and he has ideas for a modeled plaster ceiling, or a ceiling with plaster-covered beams and cornice and a fine application of ornament, let him do his best for you, but remember that a fine ceiling demands certain things of the room it covers.  If you have a simple little house with simple furnishings, be content to have your ceilings tinted a warm cream, keep them always clean.

When all these things are settled—­floors and ceilings and woodwork—­you may begin to plan your wall coverings.  Begin, you understand.  You will probably change your plans a dozen times before you make the final decisions.  I hope you will!  Because inevitably the last opinion is best—­it grows out of so many considerations.

The main thing to remember, when you begin to cover your walls, is that they are walls, that they are straight up and down, and have breadth and thickness, that they are supposedly strong, in other words, that they are a structural part of your house.  A wall should always be treated as a flat surface and in a conventional way.  Pictorial flowers and lifelike figures have no place upon it, but conventionalized designs may be used successfully—­witness the delighted use of the fantastic landscape papers in the middle of the Eighteenth Century.  Walls should always be obviously walls, and not flimsy partitions hung with gauds and trophies.  The wall is the background of the room, and so must be flat in treatment and reposeful in tone.