Page:Arts & Crafts Essays.djvu/308

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Of the Room and Furniture.

of our model with innumerable trifles, to the infinite tax of our space, our patience, and our purse.

Our want of care and restraint in the selection of our furniture affects both its design and manufacture.

Constantly articles are bought for temporary use—we postponing the responsibility of wise purchase until we have more time, or else we buy what is not precisely what we want but which must do, since we cannot wait to have the exact things made, and have not the time to search elsewhere for them.

Furniture, in response to this demand, must be made either so striking as to arrest the eye, or so variedly serviceable as to meet some considerable proportion of the conflicting requirements made on it by the chance intending purchaser, or else it must fall back on the impregnable basis of antiquity and silence all argument

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