The first object in furnishing a bare room is to make it
habitable,--that is useful. Take the kitchen, for example, and
usefulness is practically the sole object in fitting it up. And the
curious thing about it all is that it cannot help being beautiful in a
homely, motherly way, for it exemplifies one of the strongest elements
of all beauty and that is _service_. The kitchen may be a very humble
place but if more women would make a study of their kitchens and then
take thought, it is likely that the rest of their houses would be in
much better taste. A thing that is useful, even as with some well-worn
homely old woman who has led a good and helpful life, always acquires a
beauty of its own. It may be hard for girls to see this but it is there,
and in time it will be seen. Just as it is essentially more beautiful to
have a clean, strong body rather than a pretty face and a body that is
not what it ought to be, so is it more truly beautiful to have articles
of furnishing in our rooms, in study or kitchen, that are of
indispensable genuine use.

Take the gaudy ambitious study one girl has made for herself. It is
defaced by the presence of articles of no value at all in the world of
needs; there is nothing in it that is genuinely beautiful and nothing
that is substantially useful. The furniture is almost too cheap to stand
on its own legs, and the colours would certainly never wash and not even
wear. This room is a junk-shop of new, useless, unattractive objects of
no virtue,--in short, a most unpleasant place in which to live. Have you
ever considered what gives even the simplest clothes for distinctive
occasions a beauty of their own? It is fitness. And it is this same
fitness which tells so much in furnishing a room. It might be said of
certain dresses that they "go together," that is, they are harmonious,
they belong together, they have, like some people, the beauty of
agreeing with themselves, and a very desirable sort of beauty it is.