But my readers must not imagine from the above that I am recommending for one moment the ordinary ugly white-wash, the mere appearance of which ruins any room, or that I am ceasing to love the much-recommended papered ceiling--indeed I am not. Colour of some kind is necessary there as well as anywhere else, but the colour must be ivory, or faint terra-cotta, green, blue, or yellow, and must not be daubed on by the heavy hand of the decorator revelling in golds, and reds, and blues in bewildering confusion, and even introducing dreadful real or imitation oak beams, all well enough in houses where they are part of the fabric, and have the sentiment and beauty of age to defend their existence, but absolutely indefensible in an ordinary London house or small suburban villa, as indefensible as is old oak furbished up in Tottenham Court Road and made ghastly with sticky, varnished paint or stain, when placed in a house that has the nineteenth century and speculative builder written large all over it, in the bulging walls, its vilely drawn lines, and its rawness and newness and vulgarity of style. For it is no use attempting to have a pretty house unless we are absolutely strong-minded, and begin by forbidding the decorator to do anything but what he is told to do; and it is much wiser to write down exactly at the commencement of our decorations ‘precept on precept,’ ‘line upon line,’ ‘word by word,’ for each room, exactly what we wish the room to be arranged like, putting on paper the name and number of the wall paper, the colour of the paint, and in fact every single thing, so that at the end there can be no mistake; and above all we must not be persuaded out of our own ideas by the builder or by the upholsterer, or by anyone at all, once we have made up our minds what we intend to have, for we may be quite sure that if we are we shall repent it for ever after. I am often much disappointed to find, after I have taken real and elaborate pains to tell people exactly how their houses should be decorated, that they have allowed themselves to be talked over by the builder or the decorator, and that in consequence I am again sent for (at double the expense of course), to tell them how to get over, or in some measure mitigate the horrors that have been perpetrated. ‘It is such a nuisance to run from shop to shop getting all the different papers,’ says one, ‘and the builder had almost the same sort of design in his book, and said his hung much better than those you recommend.’ ‘Oh! we hadn’t time,’ says another, ‘and so we left it to the builder, and now, please, dear Mrs. Panton, do help us again, for the house does look horrid, and we cannot think why,’ and of course I go, and could weep, really weep, over the waste of money, time, and material which would all have been saved had they handed the builder my written plan of decorations and told him that that, and that only, was to be the order for the work.