The subject of proper furniture for a dining-room is usually settled by the house mistress before her wedding bouquet has faded, so I shall only touch on the out-of-ordinary things here.  Everyone knows that a table and a certain number of chairs and a sideboard of some kind “go together.”  The trouble is that everyone knows these things too well, and dining-room conventions are so binding that we miss many pleasant departures from the usual.

My own dining-room in New York is anything but usual, and yet there is nothing undignified about it.  The room was practically square, so that it had a certain orderly quality to begin with.  The rooms of the house are all rather small, and so to gain the greatest possible space I have the door openings at the extreme end of the wall, leaving as large a wall space as possible.  You enter this room, then, through a door at the extreme left of the south wall of the room.  Another door at the extreme right of the same wall leads to a private passage.  The space left between the doors is thereby conserved, and is broken into a large central panel flanked by two narrow panels.  The space above the doors is also paneled.  This wall is broken by a console placed under the central panel.  Above it one of the Mennoyer originals, which you may remember in the Washington Irving dining-room, is set in the wall, framed with a narrow molding of gray.  The walls and woodwork of the room are of exactly the same tone of gray—­darker than a silver gray and lighter than pewter.  Everything, color, balance, proportion, objects of art, has been uniformly considered.

Continuing, the east wall is broken in the center by the fireplace, with a mantel of white and gray marble.  A large mirror, surmounted with a bas-relief in black and white, fills the space between mantel shelf and cornice.  This mirror and bas-relief are framed with the narrow carved molding painted gray.  Here again there is the beauty of balance:  two Italian candlesticks of carved and gilded wood flank a marble bust on the mantel shelf.  There is nothing more.  On the right of the mirror, in a narrow panel, there is a wall clock of carved and gilded wood which also takes its place as a part of the wall, and keeps it.

The north wall is broken by two mirrors and a door leading to the service-pantry.  A large, four-fold screen, made of an uncut tapestry, shuts off the door.  We need all the light the windows give, so there are no curtains except the orange-colored taffeta valances at the top.  I devised sliding doors of mirrors that are pulled out of the wall at night to fill the recessed space of the windows.  Ventilation is afforded by the open fireplace, and by mechanical means.  You see we do not occupy this house in summer, so the mirrored windows are quite feasible.

The fourth wall has no openings, and it is broken into three large paneled spaces.  A console has the place of honor opposite the fireplace, and above it there is a mirror like that over the mantel.  In the two side panels are the two large Mennoyers.  There are five of these in the room, the smaller ones flanking the chimney piece.  You see that the salvation of this room depends on this careful repetition and variation of similar objects.