[Illustration:  BITS OF CORNICES.]

Over the first great question, regarding the visible wood work of the interior, Jack and Jill had held many protracted discussions:  should any of it be painted, or should all the wood be left to show its natural graining and color?  To the argument that unpainted wood is not only “natural” but strictly genuine and more interesting than paint, Jack replied that “natural” things are not always beautiful; that paint, which makes no pretense of being anything but paint, is as genuine as shellac or varnish, and that if the object is to be interesting, the bark, the knots, the worm-holes, and, if possible, the worms themselves should be displayed.  “Besides,” said he, “if we decide on hard wood, who shall choose the kinds?  There’s beech, birch and maple; cherry, whitewood and ebony; ash and brown ash and white ash and black ash; ditto oak, drawn and quartered; there’s rosewood, redwood, gopherwood and wormwood; mahogany, laurel, holly and mistletoe; cedar of Lebanon and pine of Georgia, not to mention chestnut, walnut, butternut, cocoanut and peanut, all of which are popular and available woods for finishing modern dwellings.  If we choose from this list, which may be indefinitely extended, the few kinds for which we can find room in our house, we shall be tormented with regret as long as we both do live because we didn’t choose something else.  Now if we paint, behold how simple a thing it is!  We buy a lot of white pine boards, put them up where they belong and paint them in whatever unnamable hues the prevailing fashion may chance to dictate.  Our boards need not even be of the best quality; an occasional piece of sound sap, a few hard knots, or now and then a ’snoodledog’—­as they say in Nantucket—­would do no harm.  A prudent application of shellac and putty before painting will make everything right.  Then if the fashions change, or if we should be refined beyond our present tastes and wish to go up higher, all we should need to lift the house to the same elevated plane is—­another coat of paint.  On the other hand, if we had a room finished in old English oak, growing blacker and blacker every year; in mahogany or in cheap and mournful black walnut, what could we do if the imperious mistress of the world should decree light colors?  With rare, pale, faded tints on the walls our strong, bold, heavy hard-wood finish would be painful in the extreme.  We couldn’t change the wood and we couldn’t change the fashion.”

“If you were not my own husband, Jack, I should say you were dreadfully obtuse.  Concerning fashions in house-building and furnishing I feel very much as Martin Luther felt about certain, formal religious dogmas.  If we are asked to respect them as a matter of amiable compliance, if we find them convenient, agreeable and at the same time harmless, then let us quietly accept them; but, if we are commanded to obey them as vital, if they are set before us as solemn obligations to be reverenced as we reverence the everlasting truth, then, for Heaven’s sake, let us tear them in pieces and trample them under our feet, lest we lose our power to distinguish the substance from the shadow.  The moment any particular style of building, finishing or furnishing becomes a recognized fashion, that moment I feel inclined to turn against it with all my might.”