But first let us consider how the dressing-room can be arranged should it be necessary to use it during the day as a species of sitting-room or boudoir for the mistress of the house. Of course all dressing-rooms should be painted and decorated to match, or else to harmonise with the bedrooms to which they are attached, but I think a harmony rather than an exact copy should be the aim of whoever wishes to use this room as a boudoir for some hours at least during the day. Suppose, for example, we have a very sunny bedroom, and we have selected a soft green paper, such as Smee’s ‘green ash,’ and a rose-frieze for it, in that case we could have a pale pink paper in the dressing-room above a matting, or Japanese leather dado in green and gold, with all real ivory paint, and the furniture here could be in the stained green wood which I always admire so much, and of which it seems impossible to tire. We could have the green ‘Isis’ matting and rugs on the floor, and the curtains could be of sage-green serge; this would make a charming room, and while it would not slavishly copy, neither would it flatly contradict the scheme of colour in the bedroom. In the same way a blue bedroom could have a yellow dressing-room attached, and this could be managed by selecting some real yellow paper, and placing it above either a gold-and-brown Japanese leather dado, or, yet again, above a matting dado, remembering that the matting used for this purpose must never under any circumstances have the smallest pattern on it; if it have, the look of the wall will be spoiled and the decorations will be anything but a real success. I am compelled to impress this fact upon my readers, because I have often seen a house spoiled simply because a matting dado to the room meant to the owner merely a dado made of matting; and she had not realised that chessboard patterns or large diamonds are entirely out of place in this situation. The only matting that should be used is the thin plain string-coloured kind made on purpose, and which is sold at Shoolbred’s, Oetzmann’s, and sometimes at Wallace’s for 10½d. a yard; sometimes Treloar sells it for something less in a roll of 42 yards, but this matting is essentially what the French call ‘_a vende d’occasion_,’ and has often to be really looked for until the right thing is found. If by the way a red and cream paper is put above a matting dado, and red paint is required to be used, a matting should be found which has a red thread running through it in an irregular way; it must not on any account have a set or formal pattern on it, or it will not be the success that it deserves to be.