This quest for comfort is being constantly borne in mind also in the æsthetic sense. We fit our drawing-rooms now to live in as well as to look at. We expect to sit on our sofas and in our easy chairs; hence we try to make them attractive to the back as well as to the eye. Though our wives may still occasionally pull down the window-shades to exclude a too dangerous sun, they no longer compel us to view our best rooms from the threshold as a cold, flawless, forbidden land. The extreme æsthetic tendencies which were rampant twenty years ago have been toned down by this inclination, among even our most elaborate house-furnishers, to produce the effect that rooms are intended for every-day use by rational beings. The ultra-queer colors have disappeared, and the carpets and wall-papers no longer suggest perpetual biliousness or chronic nightmare. I think, too, the idea that a drawing-room can be made bewitchingly cosey by crowding it with all one’s beautiful and ugly earthly possessions has been demonstrated to be a delusion. In these days of many wedding presents, it is difficult for young people to resist the temptation of showing all they have received. I remember that Mrs. George J. Spriggs--she was the daughter, you will remember, of ex-Assistant Postmaster-General Homer W. Green--had seven lamps in her parlor in Locust Road, three of them with umbrageous Japanese shades. Her husband explained to me that there had been a run on lamps and pepper-pots in their individual case.