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24 in a modern boudoir from this Royal School of Art Needlework. They were of a delicate greenish blue silk-rep, which hung in delicious round folds and had a bold and simple design of conventionalised lilies in a material like Tussore silk appliqué-d with a needlework edge. Of course they were intended for a purely modern room, but there were also some copies of draperies which went beautifully with Chippendale chairs and lovely old straight up and down cupboards and settees.

There is rather a tendency in the present day to make both bedrooms and boudoirs gloomy; a horrible vision of a room with walls the colour of a robin's egg (dots and all) and black furniture, rises up before me, and the owner of this apartment could not be induced to brighten up her gloom by so much as a gay pincushion. Now our grandmothers understood much better, though probably no one ever said a word to them about it, how necessary it was to light up dark recesses by contrasts. You would generally have found an exquisite old blue and white Delft jar full of scented rose leaves, a gay beau-pot full of poppies, or even a spinning-wheel with its creamy bundle of flax or wool bound by a scarlet ribbon, in the unregarded corner of a dingy passage, and I think we do not bear in mind enough how bright and gay the costumes of those days used to be. To