has no reference either in form or color to the scheme of her house.
Haven't you been in rooms where there was a jumble of mission
furniture, satinwood, fine old mahogany and gilt-legged chairs? And it
is the same with color. A woman says, "Oh, I love blue, let's have
blue!" regardless of the exposure of her room and the furnishings she
has already collected. And then when she has treated each one of her
rooms in a different color, and with a different floor covering, she
wonders why she is always fretted in going from one room to another.

Don't go about the furnishing of your house with the idea that you must
select the furniture of some one period and stick to that. It isn't at
all necessary. There are old English chairs and tables of the Sixteenth
and Seventeenth Centuries that fit into our quiet, spacious Twentieth
Century country homes. Lines and fabrics and woods are the things to be
compared.

There are so many beautiful things that have come to us from other times
that it should be easy to make our homes beautiful, but I have seen what
I can best describe as apoplectic chairs whose legs were fashioned like
aquatic plants; tables upheld by tortured naked women; lighting fixtures
in the form of tassels, and such horrors, in many houses of to-day under
the guise of being "authentic period furniture." Only a connoisseur can
ever hope to know about the furniture of every period, but all of us can
easily learn the ear-marks of the furniture that is suited to our homes.
I shan't talk about ear-marks here, however, because dozens of
collectors have compiled excellent books that tell you all about curves
and lines and grain-of-wood and worm-holes. My business is to persuade
you to use your graceful French sofas and your simple rush bottom New
England chairs in different rooms--in other words, to preach to you the
beauty of suitability. Suitability! _Suitability!_ SUITABILITY!!

It is such a relief to return to the tranquil, simple forms of
furniture, and to decorate our rooms by a process of elimination. How
many rooms have I not cleared of junk--this heterogeneous mass of
ornamental "period" furniture and bric-a-brac bought to make a room
"look cozy." Once cleared of these, the simplicity and dignity of the
room comes back, the architectural spaces are freed and now stand in
their proper relation to the furniture. In other words, the architecture
of the room becomes its decoration.

III

THE OLD WASHINGTON