With the building of their grand new house near the park the couple rise together into the sixth cycle of their development. Having travelled and studied the epochs by this time, they can tell a Louis XIV. from a Louis XV. room, and recognize that mahogany and brass sphinxes denote furniture of the Empire. This newly acquired knowledge is, however, vague and hazy. They have no confidence in themselves, so give over the fitting of their principal floors to the New York branch of a great French house. Little is talked of now but periods, plans, and elevations. Under the guidance of the French firm, they acquire at vast expense, faked reproductions as historic furniture. The spacious rooms are sticky with new gilding, and the flowered brocades of the hangings and furniture crackle to the touch. The rooms were not designed by the architect to receive any special kind of "treatment." Immense folding-doors unite the salons, and windows open anywhere. The decorations of the walls have been applied like a poultice, regardless of the proportions of the rooms and the distribution of the spaces. Building and decorating are, however, the best of educations. The husband, freed at last from his business occupations, finds in this new study an interest and a charm unknown to him before. He and his wife are both vaguely disappointed when their resplendent mansion is finished, having already outgrown it, and recognize that in spite of correct detail, their costly apartments no more resemble the stately and simple salons seen abroad than the cabin of a Fall River boat resembles the _Galerie des Glaces_ at Versailles. The humiliating knowledge that they are all wrong breaks upon them, as it is doing on hundreds of others, at the same time as the desire to know more and appreciate better the perfect productions of this art. A seventh and last step is before them but they know not how to make it. A surer guide than the upholsterer is, they know, essential, but their library contains nothing to help them. Others possess the information they need, yet they are ignorant where to turn for what they require.