shams,
leading from nowhere to nowhere. It may be a beautiful expanse of creamy
modeled plaster resting on a distinguished cornice, or it may be one of
those ghastly skim-milk ceilings with distorted cupids and roses in
relief. It may be a rectangle of plain plaster tinted cream or pale
yellow or gray, and keeping its place serenely, or it may be a
villainous stretch of ox-blood, hanging over your head like the curse of
Cain. There are hundreds of magnificent painted ceilings, and vaulted
arches of marble and gold, but these are not of immediate importance to
the woman who is furnishing a small house, and are not within the scope
of this book. So let us exercise common sense and face our especial
ceiling problem in an architectural spirit. If your house has
structural beams, leave them exposed, if you like, but treat them as
beams; stain them, and wax them, and color the spaces between them cream
or tan or warm gray, and then make the room beneath the beams strong
enough in color and furnishings to carry the impressive ceiling.

If you have an architect who is also a decorator, and he has ideas for a
modeled plaster ceiling, or a ceiling with plaster-covered beams and
cornice and a fine application of ornament, let him do his best for you,
but remember that a fine ceiling demands certain things of the room it
covers. If you have a simple little house with simple furnishings, be
content to have your ceilings tinted a warm cream, keep them always
clean.

When all these things are settled--floors and ceilings and woodwork--you
may begin to plan your wall coverings. Begin, you understand. You will
probably change your plans a dozen times before you make the final
decisions. I hope you will! Because inevitably the last opinion is
best--it grows out of so many considerations.

The main thing to remember, when you begin to cover your walls, is that
they are walls, that they are straight up and down, and have breadth and
thickness, that they are supposedly strong, in other words, that they
are a structural part of your house. A wall should always be treated as
a flat surface and in a conventional way. Pictorial flowers and lifelike
figures have no place upon it, but conventionalized designs may be used
successfully--witness the delighted use of the fantastic landscape
papers in the middle of the Eighteenth Century. Walls should always be
obviously _walls_, and not flimsy partitions hung with gauds and
trophies. The wall is t