It is impossible to overestimate the importance of women’s influence in the formation of taste: if men are the dynamos, women are the distributors. As mothers, as sisters, as wives, their mental energies are playing continuously on the plastic material of their immediate surroundings. Men, as a rule, are only intellectually affected by the artistic views of their fellow men, but the likes and dislikes of women work themselves into the most intimate fibres of domestic life. The decoration of a house, its intimates, its conversation, its amusements, its entertainments reflect far more of the woman than of the man who, if he is not satisfied, prefers to seek a freer artistic atmosphere outside his own doors than to attempt the almost impossible task of bringing it with him into an unreceptive household. The position is not one to be regretted, for women should be the source of beauty as man of protection and maintenance; but the comparative dryness of this source in England is remarkable, seeing the amount of time and money spent upon accomplishments and the multitudes of our women who play, sing and draw all over the world. When I consider the drawingrooms and diningrooms that English women will complacently regard, the futile pictures upon the walls, the tasteless, shapeless ornaments, and, above all, the absence of harmonious finish which makes their household gods, where they do not blatantly display a common origin in Tottenham Court Road, appear a hasty collection from the junk-shop round the corner rather than a successful combination of effects on an artistic plan—on this count alone I cannot think this remonstrance overstated. The pity is all the greater in that we start with so many advantages. The hideous stiffness of the Germans and the rather uncomfortable formality of the French is not ours. It is natural to us to be comfortable, we make our rooms look as if they were lived in, we have thrown off Victorian dinginess for cheerful colours, we have a magnificent tradition in furniture; yet with all this, while we often achieve the pleasantly habitable, we rarely achieve the completely artistic. There is really no impossibility in this achievement: all we want is a finer eye, a nicer discrimination, a higher standard of design in essentials and a greater regard for elegance and harmony in appurtenances. We are too contented, at present, with the merely pretty or the baldly useful; we buy without criticism, we replace with inconsequence and, worst of all, we inherit with effusion. Our Englishwoman will go out sketching-block in hand to capture the delicate contours of our English hills and our English clouds, and strive to mix in her palette the exquisite harmonies that blend in English heaths and lanes and bricks, yet she will return to stare without loathing at furniture which violates every canon of proportion and colours that cry aloud in their disagreement, as if art was all very well in the fields and woods but wholly out of place