She must not touch anything. All she may do is to read a book—not really read it, that would suggest too much life and movement: she sits with the book in her lap and gazes into the fire, if it happens to be the dining-room: or out of the window if it happens to be a morning-room, and the architect wishes to call attention to the window-seat. Nothing of the male species, as far as I have been able to ascertain, has ever entered these rooms. I once thought I had found a man who had been allowed into his own “Smoking-Den,” but on closer examination it turned out he was only a portrait. Sometimes one is given “Vistas.” Doors stand open, and you can see right away through “The Nook” into the garden. There is never a living soul about the place. The whole family has been sent out for a walk or locked up in the cellars. This strikes you as odd until you come to think the matter out. The modern man and woman is not artistic. I am not artistic—not what I call really artistic. I don’t go well with Gobelin tapestry and warming-pans. I feel I don’t. Robina is not artistic, not in that sense. I tried her once with a harpsichord I picked up cheap in Wardour Street, and a reproduction of a Roman stool. The thing was an utter failure. A cottage piano, with a photo-frame and a fern upon, it is what the soul cries out for in connection with Robina. Dick is not artistic. Dick does not go with peacocks’ feathers and guitars. I can see Dick with a single peacock’s feather at St. Giles’s Fair, when the bulldogs are not looking; but the decorative panel of peacock’s feathers is too much for him. I can imagine him with a banjo—but a guitar decorated with pink ribbons! To begin with he is not dressed for it. Unless a family be prepared to make themselves up as troubadours or cavaliers and to talk blank verse, I don’t see how they can expect to be happy living in these fifteenth-century houses. The modern family—the old man in baggy trousers and a frock-coat he could not button if he tried to; the mother of figure distinctly Victorian; the boys in flannel suits and collars up to their ears; the girls in motor caps—are as incongruous in these mediæval dwellings as a party of Cook’s tourists drinking bottled beer in the streets of Pompeii. The designer of “The Artistic Home” is right in keeping to still life. In the artistic home—to paraphrase Dr. Watts—every prospect pleases and only man is inartistic. In the picture, the artistic bedroom, “in apple green, the bedstead of cherry-wood, with a touch of turkey-red throughout the draperies,” is charming. It need hardly be said the bed is empty. Put a man or woman in that cherry-wood bed—I don’t care how artistic they may think themselves—the charm would be gone. The really artistic party, one supposes, has a little room behind, where he sleeps and dresses himself. He peeps in at the door of this artistic bedroom, maybe occasionally enters to change the roses.