hest men in this country never really live in their own homes,
never are comfortable for a moment, although the walls are hung double
with Fragonards and hawthorne vases stand so deep upon the tables that
no space remains for the "Saturday Review" or "le Temps." And they
never, never, never, will know the pleasure which comes while
stumbling down a side street in London, or in the mouldy corners of
the Venetian ghetto, or in the Marche du Temple in Paris, or, heaven
knows, in New York, on lower Fourth Avenue, or in Chinatown, or in a
Russian brass shop on Allen Street, or in a big department store (as
often there as anywhere) in finding just the lamp for just the table
in just the corner, or in discovering a bit of brocade, perhaps the
ragged remnant of a waistcoat belonging to an aristocrat of the
Directorate, which will lighten the depths of a certain room, or a
chair which goes miraculously with a desk already possessed, or a
Chinese mirror which one had almost decided did not exist. Nor will
they ever experience the joy of sudden decision in front of a picture
by Matisse, which ends in the sale of a Delacroix. Nor can they feel
the thrill which is part of the replacing of a make-shift rug by _the_
rug of rugs (let us hope it was Solomon's!).

I know a lady in Paris whose salon presents a different aspect each
summer. Do her Picassos go, a new Spanish painter has replaced them.
Have you missed the Gibbons carving? Spanish church carving has taken
its place. "And where are your Venetian embroideries?" "I sold them to
the Marquise de V.... The money served to buy these Persian
miniatures." This lady has travelled far. She is not experimenting in
doubtful taste or bad art; she is not even experimenting in her own
taste: she is simply enjoying different epochs, different artists,
different forms of art, each in its turn, for so long as it says
anything to her. Her house is not a museum. Space and comfort demand
exclusion but she excludes nothing forever that she desires.... She
exchanges.

Taste at best is relative. It is an axiom that anybody else's taste
can never say anything to you although you may feel perfectly certain
that it is better than your own. If more of the money of the rich
were spent in encouraging children to develop their own ideas in
furnishing their own rooms it would serve a better purpose than it
does now when it is dropped into the ample pockets of the professional
decorators. Oscar Wilde wrote,