The floor was dully lustrous, avoiding the vulgar shininess of varnish so esteemed a decade or so before. There was a great deal of black in all the fabrics as was then the fashion (now it would be vermilion and verdigris green); chintz curtains with a black background and a splashingly-colored design of wreaths and strange large birds; black satin sofa-pillows, with stiff quilled ruffles in brilliant colors to match the birds. The shades of the electric lights (which were of course designed to make them look like candles) were ornamented with cut-out black silhouettes of nude ladies with extremely long legs. The furniture was either all “antique” or had been doctored to look as though it were. A large, dark, carved chest stood against a wall--to contain what it was difficult to conjecture. The chairs had the correct kind of legs and backs and arms, that is, the kind that had not yet been copied sufficiently to spoil it for the discerning taste; and the straight, curiously-shaped table was at least two jumps ahead of anything shown at that time even by the most enterprising department-store. The walls, in accordance with the order of the day, were for the most part smartly and knowingly bare, with a few permissible reproductions of Chinese landscapes; one a tall, narrow study of bamboo shoots, another a long, narrow study of snowy mountains, depicted in three or four lines (this year it would be, I suppose, an 1858 panel by Jolly). I sat down in what looked like the most comfortable of the distinguished chairs, my feet on one of the correctly Oriental rugs, and looked dispiritedly about me for some sign of living taste in all that tastefully arranged room. There was plenty of taste shown there; but it smelled so of the pages of an expensive magazine printed on highly-glazed paper, that presently, as I sat there, despairing of my race, I felt my own body take on the same flat, two-dimensional unreality. Well, that is the sort of flat and unreal creatures human beings are when it comes to taste, I reflected. There was not, so far as I could see, one single object in that room (and God knows there were plenty of objects in it!) which rang out with the clear, brave note of a thing chosen because it gives pleasure. Everything about me wore a large, invisible but plainly legible placard, setting forth that it was there because it was “the thing”; and that the instant “the thing” was something else it would be cast out and replaced with something else as meaningless as itself in the life of the owner.