“My idea of a house,” she had said, “is to have it even more beautiful without than within, so that every line may be a positive delight to the many who can never look within its doors. Think what a boon to the thousands who never step inside a church are those Back Bay towers and steeples which I used to see from my attic window on the hill. “A poor man has no money for a concert of good music; he has no time for a visit to an art museum to see a good picture or statue, or to go to a library to read a great poem; but in sunlight and in moonlight, seven days in the week, as he looks from his window or passes to his work, the beauty wrought in stone is his; it costs him neither time nor money, and consciously or unconsciously it appeals to him. His life is larger and richer for it. “A walk across the Public Garden on a winter afternoon, with that campanile and the spires near it looming large and dark against the crimson glow in the west, has made me fresh and strong after many a tired day,” she used to say. So it was settled that when the walls of the House Beautiful should be reared, the first thought should be, not for its inmates, but for the countless unknown passers-by. Then the next requirement was that it should have ample room for the many guests whom its hospitable mistress would always have around her. There was to be air and sunshine everywhere, and nothing too fine for constant use. Unlike most women, Mildred had little fancy for beauty of the fragile sort. Exquisitely painted sèvres which a careless touch might shiver to atoms; cobweb lace that had cost the eyesight and health of other women; tapestry which had swallowed up years of another’s life, only to be inferior to a painting, and become food for moths,—all this she obstinately refused to have.