on which we build.  You have a right to make your dining-room as fine as you please, so long as you give it its measure of light and air.  But one thing you must have:  simplicity!  It may be the simplicity of a marble floor and tapestried walls and a painted ceiling, it may be the simplicity of white paint and muslin and fine furniture, but simplicity it must have.  The furniture that is required in a dining-room declares itself:  a table and chairs.  You can bring side tables and china closets into it, or you can build in cupboards and consoles to take their place, but there is little chance for other variation, and so the beginning is a declaration of order and simplicity.

[Illustration:  A GEORGIAN DINING-ROOM IN THE WILLIAM ISELIN HOUSE]

The easiest way to destroy this simplicity is to litter the room with displays of silver and glass, to dot the walls with indifferent pictures.  If you are courageous enough to let your walls take care of themselves and to put away your silver and china and glass, the room will be as dignified as you could wish.  Remember that simplicity depends on balance and space.  If the walls balance one another in light and shadow, if the furniture is placed formally, if walls and furniture are free from mistaken ornament, the room will be serene and beautiful.  In most other rooms we avoid the “pairing” of things, but here pairs and sets of things are most desirable.  Two console tables are more impressive than one.  There is great decorative value in a pair of mirrors, a pair of candlesticks, a pair of porcelain jars, two cupboards flanking a chimney-piece.  You would not be guilty of a pair of wall fountains, or of two wall clocks, just as you would not have two copies of the same portrait in a room.  But when things “pair” logically, pair them!  They will furnish a backbone of precision to the room.

The dining-room in the Iselin house is a fine example of stately simplicity.  It is extremely formal, and yet there is about it none of the gloominess one associates with New York dining-rooms.  The severely paneled walls, the fine chimney-piece with an old master inset and framed by a Grinling Gibbons carving, the absence of the usual mantel shelf, the plain dining-table and the fine old lion chairs all go to make up a Georgian room of great distinction.

The woman who cannot afford such expensive simplicity might model a dining-room on this same plan and accomplish a beautiful room at reasonable expense.  Paneled walls are always possible; if you can’t afford wood paneling, paint the plastered wall white or cream and break it into panels by using a narrow molding of wood.  You can get an effect of great dignity by the use of molding at a few cents a foot.  A large panel would take the place of the Grinling Gibbons carving, and a mirror might be inset above the fireplace instead of the portrait.  The dining-table and chairs might give place to good reproductions of Chippendale, and the marble console to a carpenter-made one painted to match the woodwork.