rtling and promising condition of affairs.

It is no longer possible, even to people of only faintly aesthetic
tastes, to buy chairs merely to sit upon or a clock merely that it
should tell the time. Home-makers are determined to have their houses,
outside and in, correct according to the best standards. What do we mean
by the best standards? Certainly not those of the useless, overcharged
house of the average American millionaire, who builds and furnishes his
home with a hopeless disregard of tradition. We must accept the
standards that the artists and the architects accept, the standards that
have come to us from those exceedingly rational people, our ancestors.

Our ancestors built for stability and use, and so their simple houses
were excellent examples of architecture. Their spacious, uncrowded
interiors were usually beautiful. Houses and furniture fulfilled their
uses, and if an object fulfils its mission the chances are that it is
beautiful.

It is all very well to plan our ideal house or apartment, our individual
castle in Spain, but it isn't necessary to live among intolerable
furnishings just because we cannot realize our castle. There never was a
house so bad that it couldn't be made over into something worth while.
We shall all be very much happier when we learn to transform the things
we have into a semblance of our ideal.

How, then, may we go about accomplishing our ideal?

By letting it go!

By forgetting this vaguely pleasing dream, this evidence of our smug
vanity, and making ourselves ready for a new ideal.

By considering the body of material from which it is good sense to
choose when we have a house to decorate.

By studying the development of the modern house, its romantic tradition
and architectural history.

By taking upon ourselves the duty of self-taught lessons of sincerity
and common sense, and suitability.

By learning what is meant by color and form and line, harmony and
contrast and proportion.

When we are on familiar terms with our tools, and feel our vague ideas
clearing into definite inspiration, then we are ready to talk about
ideals. We are fit to approach the full art of home-making.

We take it for granted that every woman is interested in houses--that
she either has a house in course of construction, or dreams of having
one, or has had a house long enough wrong to wish it right. And we take
it for granted that this American home is always the woman's home: a man
may