From this rose and blue bedroom you enter a little dressing-room that is also full of color.  Here are the same cream walls, the dull red carpet, the old blue silk shades on lamps and candles, but the chintz is different:  the ground is black, and gray parrots and paroquets swing in blue-green festoons of leaves and branches.  The dressing-table is placed in front of the window, so that you can see yourself for better or for worse.  There is a three-fold mirror of black and gold lacquer, and a Chinese cabinet of the same lacquer in the corner.  The low seat before the dressing-table is covered with the chintz.  A few costume prints hang on the wall.  You can imagine how impossible it would be to be ill-tempered in such a cheerful place.

VII

OF DOORS, AND WINDOWS, AND CHINTZ

What a sense of intimacy, of security, encompasses one when ushered into a living room in which the door opens and closes!  Who that has read Henry James’s remarkable article on the vistas dear to the American hostess, our portiere-hung spaces, guiltless of doors and open to every draft, can fail to feel how much better our conversation might be were we not forever conscious that between our guests and the greedy ears of our servants there is nothing but a curtain!  All that curtains ever were used for in the Eighteenth Century was as a means of shutting out drafts in large rooms inadequately heated by wood fires.

How often do we see masses of draperies looped back and arranged with elaborate dust-catching tassels and fringes that mean nothing.  These curtains do not even draw!  I am sure that a good, well-designed door with a simple box-lock and hinges would be much less costly than velvet hangings.  A door is not an ugly object, to be concealed for very shame, but a fine architectural detail of great value.  Consider the French and Italian doors with their architraves.  How fine they are, how imposing, how honest, and how well they compose!

Of course, if your house has been built with open archways, you will need heavy curtains for them, but there are curtains and curtains.  If you need portieres at all, you need them to cut off one room from another, and so they should hang in straight folds.  They should be just what they pretend to be—­honest curtains with a duty to fulfil.  For the simple house they may be made of velvet or velveteen in some neutral tone that is in harmony with the rugs and furnishings of the rooms that are to be divided.  They should be double, usually, and a faded gilt gimp may be used as an outline or as a binding.  There are also excellent fabrics reproducing old brocades and even old tapestries, but it is well to be careful about using these fabrics.  There are machine-made “tapestries” of foliage designs in soft greens and tans and browns on a dark blue ground that are very pleasing.  Many of these stuffs copy in color and design the