Suppose you have obtained this sort of wisdom--a sane viewpoint. I think
it will give you as great a satisfaction to re-arrange your house with
what you have as to re-build, re-decorate. The results may not be so
charming, but you can learn by them. You can take your indiscriminate
inheritance of Victorian rosewood of Eastlake walnut and cocobolo, your
pickle-and-plum colored Morris furniture, and make a civilized interior
by placing it right, and putting detail at the right points. Your sense
of the pleasure and meaning of human intercourse will be clear in your
disposition of your best things, in your elimination of your worst ones.

When you have emptied the tables of _rubbish_ so that you can put
_things_ down on them at need, placed them in a light where you can
write on them in repose, or isolated real works of art in the middle of
them; when you have set your dropsical sofas where you want them for
talk, or warmth and reading; when you can see the fire from the bed in
your sleeping-room, and dress near your bath; if this sort of sense of
your rights is acknowledged in your rearrangement, your rooms will
always have meaning, in the end. If you like only the things in a chair
that have meaning, and grow to hate the rest you will, without any other
instruction, prefer--the next time you are buying--a good Louis XVI
_fauteuil_ to a stuffed velvet chair. You will never again be guilty of
the errors of meaningless magnificence.

To most of us in America who must perforce lead workaday lives, the
absence of beauty is a very distinct lack. I think, indeed, that the
present awakening has come to stay, and that before very long, we shall
have simple houses with fireplaces that draw, electric lights in the
proper places, comfortable and sensible furniture, and not a gilt-legged
spindle-shanked table or chair anywhere. This may be a decorator's
optimistic dream, but let us all hope that it may come true.