How often we get a more definite idea of brilliant color from a white-walled room, with dark and severe furniture and no ornaments, no actual color save the blue sky framed by the windows and the flood of sunshine that glorifies everything, than from a room that has a dozen fine colors, carefully brought together, in its furnishings!

We must decide our wall colors by the aspect of our rooms.  Rooms facing south may be very light gray, cream, or even white, but northern rooms should be rich in color, and should suggest warmth and just a little mystery.  Some of you have seen the Sala di Cambio at Perugia.  Do you remember how dark it seems when one enters, and how gradually the wonderful coloring glows out from the gloom and one is comforted and soothed into a sort of dreamland of pure joy, in the intimate satisfaction of it all?  It is unsurpassable for sheer decorative charm, I think.

For south rooms blues and grays and cool greens and all the dainty gay colors are charming.  Do you remember the song Edna May used to sing in “The Belle of New York”?  I am not sure of quoting correctly, but the refrain was:  “Follow the Light!” I have so often had it in mind when I’ve been planning my color schemes—­“Follow the Light!” But light colors for sunshine, remember, and dark ones for shadow.

For north rooms I am strongly inclined to the use of paneling in our native American woods, that are so rich in effect, but alas, so little used.  I hope our architects will soon realize what delightful and inexpensive rooms can be made of pine and cherry, chestnut and cypress, and the beautiful California redwood.  I know of a library paneled with cypress.  The beamed ceiling, the paneled walls, the built-in shelves, the ample chairs and long tables are all of the soft brown cypress.  Here, if anywhere, you would think a monotony of brown wood would be obvious, but think of the thousands of books with brilliant bindings!  Think of the green branches of trees seen through the casement windows!  Think of the huge, red-brick fireplace, with its logs blazing in orange and yellow and vermillion flame!  Think of the distinction of a copper bowl of yellow flowers on the long brown table!  Can’t you see that this cypress room is simply glowing with color?

I wish that I might be able to show all you young married girls who are working out your home-schemes just how to work out the color of a room.  Suppose you are given some rare and lovely jar, or a wee rug, or a rare old print, or even a quaint old chair from long ago, and build a room around it.  I have some such point of interest in every room I build, and I think that is why some people like my rooms—­they feel, without quite knowing why, that I have loved them while making them.  Now there is a little sitting-room and bedroom combined in a certain New York house that I worked out from a pair of Chinese jars.  They were the oddest things, of a sort of blue-green and mauve and mulberry, with flecks of black, on a cream porcelain ground.