Under the two tiny windows were those terrible snags we decorators always strike, the radiators.  Wrongly placed, they are capable of spoiling any room.  I concealed these radiators by building two small cabinets with panels of iron framework gilded to suggest a graceful metal lattice, and lined them with rose-colored silk.  I borrowed this idea from a fascinating cabinet in an old French palace, and the result is worth the deception.  The cabinets are nice in themselves, and they do not interfere with the radiation of the heat.

I have seen many charming country houses and farm houses in France with dining-rooms furnished with painted furniture.  Somehow they make the average American dining-room seem very commonplace and tiresome.  For instance, I had the pleasure of furnishing a little country house in France and we planned the dining-room in blue and white.  The furniture was of the simplest, painted white, with a dark blue line for decoration.  The corner cupboard was a little more elaborate, with a gracefully curved top and a large glass door made up of little panes set in a quaint design.  There were several drawers and a lower cupboard.  The drawers and the lower doors invited decorations a little more elaborate than the blue lines of the furniture, so we painted on gay little medallions in soft tones of blue, from the palest gray-blue to a very dark blue.  The chair cushions were blue, and the china was blue sprigged.  Three little pitchers of dark-blue luster were on the wall cupboard shelf and a mirror in a faded gold frame gave the necessary variation of tone.

A very charming treatment for either a country or small city dining-room is to have corner cupboards of this kind cutting off two corners.  They are convenient and unusual and pretty as well.  They can be painted in white with a colored line defining the panels and can be made highly decorative if the panels are painted with a classic or a Chinese design.  The decoration, however, should be kept in variations of the same tone as the stripe on the panels.  For instance, if the stripe is gray, then the design should be in dark and light gray and blue tones.  The chairs can be white, in a room of this kind, with small gray and blue medallions and either blue and white, or plain blue, cushions.

Another dining-room of the same sort was planned for a small country house on Long Island.  Here the woodwork was a deep cream, the walls the same tone, and the ceiling a little lighter.  We found six of those prim Duxbury chairs, with flaring spindle-backs, and painted them a soft yellow-green.  The table was a plain pine one, with straight legs.  We painted it cream and decorated the top with a conventional border of green adapted from the design of the china—­a thick creamy Danish ware ornamented with queer little wavy lines and figures.  I should have mentioned the china first, because the whole room grew from that.  The rug was a square of velvet of a darker green.