u think so?"

Louis XVI thought a salon well furnished with a few fine chairs and a
table. He wished to be of supreme importance. In the immense salons of
the Italian palaces there were a few benches and chairs. People then
wished spaces about them.

Nowadays, people are swamped by their furniture. Too many centuries, too
many races, crowd one another in a small room. The owner seems
insignificant among his collections of historical furniture. Whether he
collects all sorts of things of all periods in one heterogeneous mass,
or whether he fills his house with the furniture of some one epoch, he
is not at home in his surroundings.

The furniture of every epoch records its history. Our ancestors of the
Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries inherited the troublous times of
their fathers in their heavy oaken chests. They owned more chests than
anything else, because a chest could be carried away on the back of a
sturdy pack mule, when the necessity arose for flight.

People never had time to sit down in the Sixteenth Century. Their
feverish unrest is recorded in their stiff, backed chairs. It was not
until the Seventeenth Century that they had time to sit down and talk.
We need no book of history to teach us this--we have only to observe the
ample proportions of the arm-chairs of the period.

Our ancestors of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth centuries worked with a
faith in the permanence of what they created. We have lost this happy
confidence. We are occupied exclusively with preserving and reproducing.
We have not succeeded in creating a style adapted to our modern life. It
is just as well! Our life, with its haste, its nervousness and its
preoccupations, does not inspire the furniture-makers. We cannot do
better than to accept the standards of other times, and adapt them to
our uses.

Why should we American woman run after styles and periods of which we
know nothing? Why should we not be content with the fundamental things?
The formal French room is very delightful in the proper place but when
it is unsuited to the people who must live in it it is as bad as a sham
room. The woman who wears paste jewels is not so conspicuously wrong as
the woman who plasters herself with too many real jewels at the wrong
time!

This is what I am always fighting in people's houses, the unsuitability
of things. The foolish woman goes about from shop to shop and buys as
her fancy directs. She sees something "pretty" and buys it, though it