he background of the room, and so must be flat in
treatment and reposeful in tone.

Walls have always offered tempting spaces for decoration. Our ancestors
hung their walls with trophies. Our pioneer of to-day may live in an
adobe hut, but he hangs his walls with things that suggest beauty and
color to him, calendars, and trophies and gaudy chromos. The rest of his
hut he uses for the hard business of living, but his walls are his
theater, his literature, his recreation. The wolf skin will one day give
place to a painting of the chase, the gaudy calendars to better things,
when prosperity comes. But now these crude things speak for the pioneer
period of the man, and therefore they are the right things for the
moment. How absurd would be the refined etching and the delicate
water-color on these clay walls, even were they within his grasp!

The first impulse of all of us is to hang the things we admire on our
walls. Unfortunately, we do not always select papers and fabrics and
pictures we will continue to admire. Who doesn't know the woman who goes
to a shop and selects wall papers as she would select her gowns, because
they are "new" and "different" and "pretty"? She selects a "rich" paper
for her hall and an "elegant" paper for her drawing-room--the chances
are it is a nile green moire paper! For her library she thinks a paper
imitating an Oriental fabric is the proper thing, and as likely as not
she buys gold paper for her dining-room. She finds so many charming
bedroom papers that she has no trouble in selecting a dozen of them for
insipid blue rooms and pink rooms and lilac rooms.

She forgets that while she wears only one gown at a time she will live
with all her wall papers all the time. She decides to use a red paper of
large figures in one room, and a green paper with snaky stripes in the
adjoining room, but she doesn't try the papers out; she doesn't give
them the fair test of living with them a few days.

You can always buy, or borrow, a roll of the paper you like and take it
home and live with it awhile. The dealer will credit the roll when you
make the final decisions. You should assemble all the papers that are to
be used in the house, and all the fabrics, and rugs, and see what the
effect of the various compositions will be, one with another. You can't
consider one room alone, unless it be a bedroom, for in our modern
houses we believe too thoroughly in spaciousness to separate our living
rooms by ante-c