e anything from a desk to a tall candlestick, and, softly
coloured, the square, wooden objects make a highly decorative effect. It
is a simple art but a striking one, and the aesthetic sense, the instinct
for balance and proportion and ultimate beauty of line and composition,
has a splendid outlet.

There is, too, the trade of the designer of garments: the word is
advisedly substituted for dresses. The real designer plans and
executes pictures, mood-expressions, character settings. She dreams
herself into the personalities of her clients, also the necessities
and the limitations! Do you think all the artistic costume-creating is
done in the Rue de la Paix? Try the Village!

And the florists! The flower shops of the Village are truly lovely,
one in particular, the Peculiar Flower Shop, which does not look at
all like a shop but like the corner of a country garden. The Village
loves flowers and understands them. Every Villager who can, grows
them. Believe me, you know nothing about flowers in an intimate sense
until you have talked with a flower-loving Villager!

Think of it--you outsiders who imagine that you are exhibiting a fine,
artistic tendency by going to an occasional exhibition, and in knowing
what colours can discreetly be worn together! Here is a small army of
vigourous idealists who live, breathe and create beauty; whose happy,
hard-working lives are filled with the exhilarating wine of art and
artistic expression; who, when night comes, never turn the keys of
their workshops without the knowledge that they have made one more
beautiful thing since dawn, one more concrete materialisation of the
art-dream in man, one more new creation to help to furnish pleasure
for a beauty-loving world!

There is something about those new forms of art work which recalls the
richer and more leisurely past, when good artisans were scarcely less
revered than great artists; when men toiled half a lifetime to fashion
one or two perfect things; when even the commonest utilitarian
articles were expected to be beautiful and were made so by the applied
genius of a race of working artists. It suggests other lands too--the
East where you will hardly ever see an ugly object, and where
everything from a pitcher to a rug is a thing of loveliness; the South
where true grace of line and colour is the rule rather than the
exception in the homeliest household utensils. Primitive peoples have
always stayed close to beauty; it is odd that it