Walls have always offered tempting spaces for decoration.  Our ancestors hung their walls with trophies.  Our pioneer of to-day may live in an adobe hut, but he hangs his walls with things that suggest beauty and color to him, calendars, and trophies and gaudy chromos.  The rest of his hut he uses for the hard business of living, but his walls are his theater, his literature, his recreation.  The wolf skin will one day give place to a painting of the chase, the gaudy calendars to better things, when prosperity comes.  But now these crude things speak for the pioneer period of the man, and therefore they are the right things for the moment.  How absurd would be the refined etching and the delicate water-color on these clay walls, even were they within his grasp!

The first impulse of all of us is to hang the things we admire on our walls.  Unfortunately, we do not always select papers and fabrics and pictures we will continue to admire.  Who doesn’t know the woman who goes to a shop and selects wall papers as she would select her gowns, because they are “new” and “different” and “pretty”?  She selects a “rich” paper for her hall and an “elegant” paper for her drawing-room—­the chances are it is a nile green moire paper!  For her library she thinks a paper imitating an Oriental fabric is the proper thing, and as likely as not she buys gold paper for her dining-room.  She finds so many charming bedroom papers that she has no trouble in selecting a dozen of them for insipid blue rooms and pink rooms and lilac rooms.

She forgets that while she wears only one gown at a time she will live with all her wall papers all the time.  She decides to use a red paper of large figures in one room, and a green paper with snaky stripes in the adjoining room, but she doesn’t try the papers out; she doesn’t give them the fair test of living with them a few days.

You can always buy, or borrow, a roll of the paper you like and take it home and live with it awhile.  The dealer will credit the roll when you make the final decisions.  You should assemble all the papers that are to be used in the house, and all the fabrics, and rugs, and see what the effect of the various compositions will be, one with another.  You can’t consider one room alone, unless it be a bedroom, for in our modern houses we believe too thoroughly in spaciousness to separate our living rooms by ante-chambers and formal approaches.  We must preserve a certain amount of privacy, and have doors that may be closed when need be, but we must also consider the effect of things when those doors are open, when the color of one room melts into the color of another.

[Illustration:  A PAINTED WALL BROKEN INTO PANELS BY NARROW MOLDINGS]