I remember taking a clever Englishwoman of much taste to see a woman who was very proud of her new house.  We had seen most of the house when the hostess, who had evidently reserved what she considered the best for the last, threw open the doors of a large and gorgeous apartment and said, “This is my Louis XVI ballroom.”  My friend, who had been very patient up to that moment, said very quietly, “What makes you think so?”

Louis XVI thought a salon well furnished with a few fine chairs and a table.  He wished to be of supreme importance.  In the immense salons of the Italian palaces there were a few benches and chairs.  People then wished spaces about them.

Nowadays, people are swamped by their furniture.  Too many centuries, too many races, crowd one another in a small room.  The owner seems insignificant among his collections of historical furniture.  Whether he collects all sorts of things of all periods in one heterogeneous mass, or whether he fills his house with the furniture of some one epoch, he is not at home in his surroundings.

The furniture of every epoch records its history.  Our ancestors of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries inherited the troublous times of their fathers in their heavy oaken chests.  They owned more chests than anything else, because a chest could be carried away on the back of a sturdy pack mule, when the necessity arose for flight.

People never had time to sit down in the Sixteenth Century.  Their feverish unrest is recorded in their stiff, backed chairs.  It was not until the Seventeenth Century that they had time to sit down and talk.  We need no book of history to teach us this—­we have only to observe the ample proportions of the arm-chairs of the period.

Our ancestors of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth centuries worked with a faith in the permanence of what they created.  We have lost this happy confidence.  We are occupied exclusively with preserving and reproducing.  We have not succeeded in creating a style adapted to our modern life.  It is just as well!  Our life, with its haste, its nervousness and its preoccupations, does not inspire the furniture-makers.  We cannot do better than to accept the standards of other times, and adapt them to our uses.

Why should we American woman run after styles and periods of which we know nothing?  Why should we not be content with the fundamental things?  The formal French room is very delightful in the proper place but when it is unsuited to the people who must live in it it is as bad as a sham room.  The woman who wears paste jewels is not so conspicuously wrong as the woman who plasters herself with too many real jewels at the wrong time!