colour scheme and _objets d'art_. It is in colour
scheme that we feel the personality of our host or hostess, therefore
give attention to this point. Always have a colour scheme sympathetic
to _you_. Make your rooms take on the air of being your abode. It is
really very simple. What has been done with vast wealth can be just as
easily done by the man of one room and a bath. Know what you want, and
buy the best you can afford; by best, meaning useful things,
indisputably beautiful in line and colour. Use your Colonial
furniture; but if you find a wonderful Empire desk, with beautiful
brass mounts and like it, buy it. They are of the same period in point
of date, as it happens, and your Louis XVI bronze candlesticks will
add a touch of grace. The writer recalls a simple room which was
really a milestone in the development of taste, for it was so
completely harmonious in colouring, arrangement of furniture, and
placing of ornaments. Built for a painter's studio, with top light, it
was used, at the time of which we speak, for music, as a Steinway
grand indicated. The room was large, the floors painted black and
covered with faded Oriental rugs; woodwork and walls were dark-green,
as were the long, low, open bookcases, above which a large foliage
tapestry was hung. On the other walls were modern paintings with
antique frames of dulled gold, while a Louis XVI inlaid desk stood
across one corner, and there was an old Italian oval table of black
wood, with great, gold birds, as pedestal and legs, at which we dined
simply, using fine old silver, and foreign pottery. This room was
responsible for starting more than one person on the pursuit of the
antique, for pervading it was a magic atmosphere, that wizard touch
which comes of _knowing, loving_ and _demanding beautiful things_, and
then treating them very humanly. Use your lovely vases for your
flowers. Hang your modern painting; but let its link with the faded
tapestry be the dull, old frame. To be explicit, use lustreless frames
and faded colours with old furniture and tapestry. Your grandmother
wears mauves and greys--not bright red.

If your taste is for modern painted furniture and vivid Bakst colours
in cushions and hangings, take your lovely old tapestry away. Speaking
of tapestries, do not imagine that they can never be used in small
rooms and narrow halls. Plate XIV shows an illustration of a hall in
an old-fashioned country house, that was so narrow that it aroused
d