The inner light, however, the participation in a perfect spirit and a peculiar, fine-flavoured quality, which distinguishes the English home does not, I fear, carry with it an irreproachability in externals. Here the English wife is perhaps less admirable. The temperamental harmony of the home so often is somewhat oddly contrasted with the decorative inharmoniousness of its material objects. Let me hasten to admit that when the Englishwoman has taste in her choice of a setting for herself she has very good taste indeed. She can achieve, at her best, with her _mise en scène_, her hangings, her furniture, her colours, her pictures, her ornaments, the same successful temperamental fusion that she achieves in her personal relations. She can create the appearance in a room of being continuously and gracefully inhabited, of having come together in all its parts inevitably, not for show but for the plainer usages of life, and yet keep it fresh and unruffled, free from the dusty footmarks of yesterday as from the odour of yesterday’s meals. The drawing-room or sitting-room of an enlightened English woman is neither a salon, awful in its bleak precision, nor simply a feminine boudoir, beflowered and rustling like a _robe de chambre_ to which the entry of a man, even of a husband, takes on the air of a gallantry or an intrusion. It remains sacred to the woman, yet rather as the main sanctuary of the household of which she is the priestess than as the holy of holies; and, in this connection, it is interesting to remark that the English woman, as a rule, has no visible inner sanctuary. She carries it, I suspect, so securely in her own heart that her writing table and her workbox are sufficient to contain its material overflow. This capacity for fusion is naturally most remarkable when it is æsthetic as well as temperamental, but striking success on the side of temperament will carry off a wonderful measure of æsthetic incongruity. There are rooms that I know full of conventional horrors, all photographs and sham Chippendale, easy chairs and uneasy tables, that I would not have changed for the world for the sake of the friend who animates them. Yet it must be confessed that the majority of our women have little taste in the appointments of a house. A long and bad Victorian tradition may to some extent account for this, but it is due also to a want of clearness in balancing the claims of comfort and beauty, and to a certain practical hastiness, a kind of unselfish frugality, which forbids them to spend too much forethought on what is not in itself immediately useful.