or-relation attachment, spoiling the
completeness and artistic unity of the larger one. By care you may
avoid something of this; if you follow the fashion, you will have the
most of it. When the two rooms are twins, alike in every respect, they
are really one large room, fitted up, for economical reasons, with a
movable screen in the centre, by means of which you may warm
(excepting rheumatic currents as above) and use one half at a time.
But call things by their right names. Don't talk grandly about your
two parlors when you mean two halves of one. Have wide doors, by all
means, not only between rooms but into main hall,--four, six, or eight
feet, if the rooms are so wide and high that they shall not be
disproportionately large. Then, if you must have the whole broadside
of sliding or folding doors, let the two rooms thus connected be of
different styles but equal richness,--different, that they shall not
seem one room cut in two,--peers, that one shall not shame and cheapen
the other.

Doors are a great bother, at best. I wish they could be abolished.
They are always slamming, punching holes in the plastering with their
knobs, creaking on their hinges, bruising the piano, pinching babies'
fingers, and making old folks see stars when they get up in the night
to look for burglars. Heavy curtains are infinitely more graceful,
equally warm, and not half so stubbornly unmanageable. Then think of
entering a room. By her steps the goddess is revealed; but who can
walk like a goddess while forcing an entrance between two
sliding-doors, maybe wedging fast half-way through? How different
from passing in quiet dignity beneath the rich folds of overhanging
drapery! But I suppose we must leave all that to the Orientals, at
present.

"You would almost as soon give up the bay-windows!" Well, you might
e'en do worse than that. Now let your indignation boil. Bay-windows
are very charming things sometimes; sometimes they are nuisances. Some
have been so appropriate and altogether lovely that any pepper box
contrivance thrusting itself out from the main walls and looking three
ways for Sunday is supposed to be a bower of beauty, a perfect pharos
of observation, an abundant recompense for unmitigated ugliness and
inconvenience in the rest of the building. Truly, a well-ordered
bay-window will often change a gloomy, graceless room into a cheerful
and artistic one, but large, simple windows are sometimes rather to be
chosen than too muc