This matter of appropriateness must not be overlooked, and the whole house should express the spirit of the owner; it should be in absolute keeping with his circumstances.  There are few houses which naturally demand the treatment of palaces, but there are many which correspond with the smaller chateaux of France and the manor-houses of England.  It is to these we must turn for our inspiration, for they have the beauty of good taste and high standards without the lavishness of royalty; but even royalty did not always live in rooms of state, for at Versailles, and Petit Trianon, there is much simple exquisite furniture.  The wonderful and elaborate furniture of the past must be studied of course, but to the majority of people, then as now, the simpler expression of its fundamental lines of beauty are more satisfactory.  The trouble with many houses is that their furnishings are copied from too grand models, and the effect in an average modern house is unsuitable in every way.  They cannot give the large vistas and appropriate background in color and proportion which are necessary.  Beauty does not depend upon magnificence.

[Illustration:  The warm tones of a brown Chinese wallpaper are attractive with the mahogany furniture, and the pattern is prevented from becoming monotonous by the strong rectangular lines of the ivory woodwork which frames it.  The corner cupboard and the exceptionally fine dining-table and the variety of chairs are interesting.]

If one has to live in a house planned and built by others one often has to give up some long cherished scheme and adopt something else more suited to the surroundings.  For instance, the rooms of the great French periods were high, and often the modern house has very low ceilings, that would not allow space for the cornice, over-doors and correctly proportioned paneling, that are marked features of those times.  Mrs. Wharton has aptly said:  “Proportion is the good breeding of architecture,” and one might add that proportion is good breeding itself.  One little slip from the narrow path into false proportion in line or color or mass and the perfection of effect is gone.

Proportion is another word for the fitness of things, and that little phrase, “the fitness of things,” is what Alice in Wonderland calls a “portmanteau” phrase, for it holds so much, and one must feel it strongly to escape the pitfalls of period furnishing.  Most amazing things are done with perfect complacency, but although the French and English kings who gave their names to the various periods were far from models of virtue, they certainly deserved no such cruel punishment as to have some of the modern rooms, such as we have all seen, called after them.

The best decorators refuse to mix styles in one room and they thus save people from many mistakes, but a decorator without a thorough understanding of the subject, often leads one to disaster.  A case in point is an apartment where a small Louis XV room opens on a narrow hall of nondescript modern style, with a wide archway opening into a Mission dining-room.  As one sits in the midst of pink brocade and gilding and looks across to the dining-room, fitted out in all the heavy paraphernalia of Mission furniture, one’s head fairly reels.  No contrast could be more marked or more unsuitable, and yet this is by no means an uncommon case.