In my own house the bedrooms open into dressing-rooms, so much of the usual furniture is not necessary.  My own bedroom, for instance, is built around the same old Breton bed I had in the Washington Irving house.  The bed dominates the room, but there are also a chaise-longue, several small tables, many comfortable chairs, and a real fireplace.  The business of dressing takes place in the dressing-room, so there is no dressing-table here, but there are long mirrors filling the wall spaces between windows and doors.  Miss Marbury’s bedroom is just over mine, and is a sunshiny place of much rose and blue and cream.  Her rooms are always full of blue, just as my rooms are always full of rose color.  This bedroom has cream woodwork and walls of a bluish-gray, cream painted furniture covered with a mellow sort of rose-and-cream chintz, and a Persian rug made up of blue and cream.  The curtains at the windows are of plain blue linen bordered with a narrow blue and white fringe.  The lighting-fixtures are of carved wood, pointed in polychrome.  The most beautiful thing in the room is a Fifteenth Century painting, the Madonna of Bartolomeo Montagna, which has the place of honor over the mantel.

I haven’t said a word about our nice American Colonial bedrooms, because all of you know their beauties and requirements as well as I. The great drawback to the stately old furniture of our ancestors is the space it occupies.  Haven’t you seen a fine old four post bed simply overflowing a poor little room?  Fortunately, the furniture-makers are designing simple beds of similar lines, but lighter build, and these beds are very lovely.  The owner of a massive old four-post bed is justly proud of it, but our new beds are built for a new service and a new conception of hygiene, and so must find new lines and curves that will be friendly to the old dressing tables and highboys and chests of drawers.

When we are fortunate enough to inherit great old houses, of course we will give them proper furniture—­if we can find it.

I remember a house in New Orleans that had a full dozen spacious bedrooms, square, closetless chambers that opened into small dressing-rooms.  One of them, I remember, was absolutely bare of wall and floor, with a great Napoleon bed set squarely in the center of it.  There was the inevitable mosquito net canopy, here somehow endowed with an unexpected dignity.  One felt the room had been made for sleeping, and nothing but sleeping, and while the bed was placed in the middle of the floor to get all the air possible, its placing was a master stroke of decoration in that great white walled room.  It was as impressive as a royal bed on a dais.