Page:Bedroom and Boudoir.djvu/128

113 is never more apparent than in the spare room. Sometimes your hostess tries to make you happy with looking-glasses, and I have shudderingly dwelt in a room with five large mirrors and sundry smaller ones; or else you are abashed to find how many gowns there is space for, and how few you have brought. But this extreme is better than the other: I have had to keep my draperies on all the available chairs in the room because I was afraid to open and shut the diminutive drawers of an exquisite, aged coffre which was provided for their reception. Beautiful as was this article of furniture, I would gladly have changed it for the commonest deal chest of drawers, long before the week was out. In spare rooms, as in all other rooms, money is not everything. It will not always buy taste, nor even comfort. Doubtless many of my readers who may happen to have led as varied a life as mine has been, will agree with me in the assertion, that as far as actual comfort goes, they have often possessed it in a greater degree under a very humble roof-tree, than beneath many a more splendid shelter. Everybody has their "little ways" (some of them very tiresome and odd, I admit), and there are splendid spare-rooms in which apparently no margin has been left, no indulgence shown, for any little individualities.