There are expedients by which many of the malformations and uglinesses
of the ordinary "builder's house" may be greatly ameliorated, various
small surgical operations which will remedy badly planned rooms, and
dispositions of furniture which will restore proportion. We can even, by
judicious distribution of planes of colour, apparently lower or raise a
ceiling, and widen or lengthen a room, and these expedients, which
belong partly to the experience of the decorator, are based upon laws
which can easily be formulated. Every one can learn something of them by
the study of faulty rooms and the enjoyment of satisfactory ones.
Indeed, I know no surer or more agreeable way of getting wisdom in the
art of decoration than by tracing back sensation to its source, and
finding out why certain things are utterly satisfactory, and certain
others a positive source of discomfort.

In what are called the "best houses" we can make our deductions quite
as well as in the most faulty, and sometimes get a lesson of avoidance
and a warning against law-breaking which will be quite as useful as if
it were learned in less than the best.

There is one fault very common in houses which date from a period of
some forty or fifty years back, a fault of disproportionate height of
ceilings. In a modern house, if one room is large enough to require a
lofty ceiling, the architect will manage to make his second floor upon
different levels, so as not to inflict the necessary height of large
rooms upon narrow halls and small rooms, which should have only a height
proportioned to their size. A ten-foot room with a thirteen-foot ceiling
makes the narrowness of the room doubly apparent; one feels shut up
between two walls which threaten to come together and squeeze one
between them, while, on the other hand, a ten-foot room with a