Now we find ourselves in danger of loving the new one as much as
the old. But that is another story.
IV
THE LITTLE HOUSE OF MANY MIRRORS
One walks the streets of New York and receives the fantastic impression
that some giant architect has made for the city thousands of houses in
replica. These dismal brownstone buildings are so like without, and
alas! so like within, that one wonders how their owners know their homes
from one another. I have had the pleasure of making over many of these
gloomy barracks into homes for other people, and when we left the old
Irving Place house we took one of these dreary houses for ourselves, and
made it over into a semblance of what a city house should be.
You know the kind of house--there are tens of thousands of them--a four
story and basement house of pinkish brownstone, with a long flight of
ugly stairs from the street to the first floor. The common belief that
all city houses of this type must be dark and dreary just because they
always _have_ been dark and dreary is an unnecessary superstition.
My object in taking this house was twofold: I wanted to prove to my
friends that it was possible to take one of the darkest and grimiest of
city houses and make it an abode of sunshine and light, and I wanted to
furnish the whole house exactly as I pleased--for once!
The remaking of the house was very interesting.
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