A Girls Student Days and After | Page 9

to
make it attractive, it should never be forgotten that sunshine and fresh
air are more beautiful and more priceless than anything else which it
can hold.
The first object in furnishing a bare room is to make it habitable,--that
is useful. Take the kitchen, for example, and usefulness is practically
the sole object in fitting it up. And the curious thing about it all is that it
cannot help being beautiful in a homely, motherly way, for it
exemplifies one of the strongest elements of all beauty and that is

service. The kitchen may be a very humble place but if more women
would make a study of their kitchens and then take thought, it is likely
that the rest of their houses would be in much better taste. A thing that
is useful, even as with some well-worn homely old woman who has led
a good and helpful life, always acquires a beauty of its own. It may be
hard for girls to see this but it is there, and in time it will be seen. Just
as it is essentially more beautiful to have a clean, strong body rather
than a pretty face and a body that is not what it ought to be, so is it
more truly beautiful to have articles of furnishing in our rooms, in
study or kitchen, that are of indispensable genuine use.
Take the gaudy ambitious study one girl has made for herself. It is
defaced by the presence of articles of no value at all in the world of
needs; there is nothing in it that is genuinely beautiful and nothing that
is substantially useful. The furniture is almost too cheap to stand on its
own legs, and the colours would certainly never wash and not even
wear. This room is a junk-shop of new, useless, unattractive objects of
no virtue,--in short, a most unpleasant place in which to live. Have you
ever considered what gives even the simplest clothes for distinctive
occasions a beauty of their own? It is fitness. And it is this same fitness
which tells so much in furnishing a room. It might be said of certain
dresses that they "go together," that is, they are harmonious, they
belong together, they have, like some people, the beauty of agreeing
with themselves, and a very desirable sort of beauty it is. Just as clothes
are an expression of the people who wear them, so are rooms an
expression of the people who live in them. No well-bred girl cares for
tawdry, cheap, over-ornamented clothes. She is made uncomfortable
even at the very thought of having to wear such things. She should
suffer just as much discomfort on the score of a cheaply furnished (and
by "cheap" here I do not mean inexpensive--whitewash and deal
intelligently used may create a beautiful room), overcrowded and
over-ornamented study.
What is the meaning of the room which is your school centre for the
time being? It is an intimate place where a girl may have her friends
and good times; it is a retreat and it is a workshop. It is the girl's home
centre away from home, the place from which she will lead her life, in

its expression attractive or unattractive, like her or unlike her. To intend
that this room in beauty, in cleanliness, in order, shall be the best
expression possible of the girl's best self is the ideal to set for the
school study.
Get good materials and good colours. They need not be expensive.
Remember that colours have to go together just as furniture has to do
so. To have styles of furniture that clash or colours that do not
harmonize will negative any care which the student may have taken in
the selection of individual pieces or materials. To have too much with
which to fill the room is a good deal worse than not to have enough.
Much better it is to have a few things which are just what they should
be than to have too many and those undesirable. To get a desk, if a girl
can afford to do so, that she will be glad to keep her life long is a good
beginning, and a comfortable chair that will be made doubly precious
by all the school associations woven about it. And let her be careful
about pictures for her walls and not crowd them with cheap and
"fashionable" trash. Above all, let her remember that good taste,
simplicity, careful selection, will do more to assure her the possession
of an attractive room than all the money in the world can do.

V
THE TOOLS OF STUDY AND THEIR USE
A girl ought to take up her study with the same sense of pleasure as that
with which a strong