to another. Keep your wicker furniture on the porch, for which it was
intended. If it strays into the adjacent living-room, done in quite
another scheme, it will absolutely thwart your efforts at harmony,
while your porch-room done in wicker and gay chintzes, striped awnings
and geranium rail-boxes, cries out against the intrusion of a chair
dragged out from the house. Remember that should you intend using your
period ballroom from time to time as an audience room for concerts and
lectures, you must provide a complete equipment of small, very light
(so as to be quickly moved) chairs, in your "period," as a necessary
part of your decoration.

The current idea that a distinguished room remains distinguished
because costly tapestries and old masters hang on its walls, even when
the floor is strewn with vulgar, hired chairs, is an absurd mistake.
Each room from kitchen to ballroom is a stage "set,"--a harmonious
background for certain scenes in life's drama. It is the man or woman
who grasps this principle of a distinguished home who can create an
interior which endures, one which will hold its own despite the ebb
and flow of fashion. Imposing dimensions and great outlay of money do
not necessarily imply distinction, a quality depending upon unerring
good taste in the minutest details, one which may be achieved equally
in a stately mansion, in a city flat, or in a cottage by the sea.

The question of background is absorbingly interesting. A vase, with or
without flowers, to add to the composition of your room, that is, to
make "a good picture," must be placed so that its background sets it
off. Let the Venetian glass vase holding one rose stand in such a
position that your green curtain is its background, and not a
photograph or other picture. One flower, carefully placed in a room,
will have more real decorative value than dozens of costly roses