to house my little people happily—­my dogs and my birds and my fish.  Wee Toi, my little Chinese dog, has a little house all his own, an old Chinese lacquer box with a canopy top and little gold bells.  It was once the shrine of some little Chinese god, I suppose, but Wee Toi is very happy in it, and you can see that it was meant for him in the beginning.  It sits by the fireplace and gives the room an air of real hominess.  I was so pleased with the aquarium and the Chinese lacquer bed for Wee Toi that I devised a birdcage to go with them, a square cage of gilt wires, with a black lacquer pointed canopy top, with little gilt bells at the pointed eaves.  The cage is fixed to a shallow lacquer tray, and is the nicest place you can imagine for a whistling bullfinch to live in.  I suppose I could have a Persian cat on a gorgeous cushion to complete the place, but I can’t admit cats into the room.  I plan gorgeous cushions for other people’s “little people,” when they happen to be cats.

Miss Marbury’s sitting-room is on the next floor, exactly like mine, architecturally, but we have worked them out differently.  I think there is nothing more interesting than the study of the different developments of a series of similar rooms, for instance, a dozen drawing-rooms, twelve stories deep, in a modern apartment house!  Each room is left by the builder with the same arrangement of doors and windows, the same wall spaces and moldings, the same opportunity for good or bad development.  It isn’t often our luck to see all twelve of the rooms, but sometimes we see three or four of them, and how amazingly different they are!  How amusing is the suggestion of personality, or lack of it!

Now in these two sitting-rooms in our house the rooms are exactly the same in size, in exposure, in the placing of doors and windows and fireplaces, and we have further paralleled our arrangement by placing our day beds in the same wall space, but there the similarity ends.  Miss Marbury’s color plan is different:  her walls are a soft gray, the floor is covered in a solid blue carpet rug, rather dark in tone, the chintz also has a black ground, but the pattern is entirely different in character from the room below.  There is a day bed, similar to mine, but where my bed has been upholstered with brocade, Miss Marbury’s has a loose slip cover of black chintz.  The spaces between the windows in my room are filled with bookshelves, and in Miss Marbury’s room the same spaces are filled with mirrors.  The large wall-space that is background to my old secretary is in her room given up to long open bookshelves of mahogany.  My over-mantel is mirrored, and hers is filled with an old painting.  The recessed spaces on each side of the chimney breast hold small semi-circular tables of marquetry, with a pair of long Adam mirrors hanging above them.  Another Adam mirror hangs above the bookshelves on the opposite wall.  These mirrors are really the most important things in the room, because the moldings and lighting-fixtures and picture frames have been made to harmonize with them.