oration. The corner cupboard was a little more elaborate, with a
gracefully curved top and a large glass door made up of little panes set
in a quaint design. There were several drawers and a lower cupboard. The
drawers and the lower doors invited decorations a little more elaborate
than the blue lines of the furniture, so we painted on gay little
medallions in soft tones of blue, from the palest gray-blue to a very
dark blue. The chair cushions were blue, and the china was blue
sprigged. Three little pitchers of dark-blue luster were on the wall
cupboard shelf and a mirror in a faded gold frame gave the necessary
variation of tone.

A very charming treatment for either a country or small city dining-room
is to have corner cupboards of this kind cutting off two corners. They
are convenient and unusual and pretty as well. They can be painted in
white with a colored line defining the panels and can be made highly
decorative if the panels are painted with a classic or a Chinese design.
The decoration, however, should be kept in variations of the same tone
as the stripe on the panels. For instance, if the stripe is gray, then
the design should be in dark and light gray and blue tones. The chairs
can be white, in a room of this kind, with small gray and blue
medallions and either blue and white, or plain blue, cushions.

Another dining-room of the same sort was planned for a small country
house on Long Island. Here the woodwork was a deep cream, the walls the
same tone, and the ceiling a little lighter. We found six of those prim
Duxbury chairs, with flaring spindle-backs, and painted them a soft
yellow-green. The table was a plain pine one, with straight legs. We
painted it cream and decorated the top with a conventional border of
green adapted from the design of the china--a thick creamy Danish ware
ornamented with queer little wavy lines and figures. I should have
mentioned the china first, because the whole room grew from that. The
rug was a square of velvet of a darker green. The curtains were soft
cream-colored net. One wall was made up of windows, another of doors and
a cupboard, and against the other two walls we built two long, narrow
consoles that were so simple anyone could accomplish them: simply two
wide shelves resting on good brackets, with mirrors above. The one
splendid thing in the room was a curtain of soft green damask that was
pulled at night to cover the group of windows. Everything else in the
room was