The House in Good Taste

And so we women have achieved a house, luminous with kind purpose throughout. It is finished--that is our difficulty! We inherit it, all rounded in its perfection, consummate in its charms, but it is finished, and what can we do about a thing that is finished I Doesn't it seem that we are back in the old position of Isabella d'Este--eager, predatory, and "thingy"? And isn't it time for us to pull up short lest we sidestep the goal? We are so sure of a thousand appetites we are in danger of passing by the amiable commonplaces. We find ourselves dismayed in old houses that look too simple. We must stop and ask ourselves questions, and, if necessary, plan for ourselves little retreats until we can find ourselves again. What is the goal? A house that is like the life that goes on within it, a house that gives us beauty as we understand it--and beauty of a nobler kind that we may grow to understand, a house that looks amenity. 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.