any comfortable chairs, and a real fireplace. The
business of dressing takes place in the dressing-room, so there is no
dressing-table here, but there are long mirrors filling the wall spaces
between windows and doors. Miss Marbury's bedroom is just over mine, and
is a sunshiny place of much rose and blue and cream. Her rooms are
always full of blue, just as my rooms are always full of rose color.
This bedroom has cream woodwork and walls of a bluish-gray, cream
painted furniture covered with a mellow sort of rose-and-cream chintz,
and a Persian rug made up of blue and cream. The curtains at the windows
are of plain blue linen bordered with a narrow blue and white fringe.
The lighting-fixtures are of carved wood, pointed in polychrome. The
most beautiful thing in the room is a Fifteenth Century painting, the
Madonna of Bartolomeo Montagna, which has the place of honor over the
mantel.

I haven't said a word about our nice American Colonial bedrooms, because
all of you know their beauties and requirements as well as I. The great
drawback to the stately old furniture of our ancestors is the space it
occupies. Haven't you seen a fine old four post bed simply overflowing a
poor little room? Fortunately, the furniture-makers are designing
simple beds of similar lines, but lighter build, and these beds are very
lovely. The owner of a massive old four-post bed is justly proud of it,
but our new beds are built for a new service and a new conception of
hygiene, and so must find new lines and curves that will be friendly to
the old dressing tables and highboys and chests of drawers.

When we are fortunate enough to inherit great old houses, of course we
will give them proper furniture--if we can find it.

I remember a house in New Orleans that had a full dozen spacious
bedrooms, square, closetless chambers that opened into small
dressing-rooms. One of them, I remember, was absolutely bare of wall and
floor, with a great Napoleon bed set squarely in the center of it. There
was the inevitable mosquito net canopy, here somehow endowed with an
unexpected dignity. One felt the room had been made for sleeping, and
nothing _but_ sleeping, and while the bed was placed in the middle of
the floor to get all the air possible, its placing was a master stroke
of decoration in that great white walled room. It was as impressive as a
royal bed on a dais.

We are getting more sensible about our bedrooms. There is no doubt about
it. For the la