Everyone knows that a table
and a certain number of chairs and a sideboard of some kind "go
together." The trouble is that everyone knows these things _too_ well,
and dining-room conventions are so binding that we miss many pleasant
departures from the usual.
My own dining-room in New York is anything but usual, and yet there is
nothing undignified about it. The room was practically square, so that
it had a certain orderly quality to begin with. The rooms of the house
are all rather small, and so to gain the greatest possible space I have
the door openings at the extreme end of the wall, leaving as large a
wall space as possible. You enter this room, then, through a door at the
extreme left of the south wall of the room. Another door at the extreme
right of the same wall leads to a private passage. The space left
between the doors is thereby conserved, and is broken into a large
central panel flanked by two narrow panels. The space above the doors is
also paneled. This wall is broken by a console placed under the central
panel. Above it one of the Mennoyer originals, which you may remember in
the Washington Irving dining-room, is set in the wall, framed with a
narrow molding of gray. The walls and woodwork of the room are of
exactly the same tone of gray--darker than a silver gray and lighter
than pewter.
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