feelings by not putting up another shelf, or erecting another glass-shade, where neither are wanted, or driving another peg into the wall to hang a picture where no picture can be properly seen. And probably the reason you cannot is because you have shown yourself so thoughtless and haphazard in all your ideas about decoration and house-furnishing that even in that house, which you falsely assert to be your castle, you stand defenceless before this invasion of ornamental microbes! Obviously the house is not yours if others can break in and spoil its borders with their own false taste. But I can assure you that those inroads do not happen to people whose rooms show a scrupulous sense of selection. You inspire then (even in the thoughtless) a certain dread and respect. Though they regard you as uncanny and call you a crank, you are beginning their Art-training for them.
I remember, in this connection, a Quaker acquaintance whose friends descended upon him at the time of his marriage with certain household monstrosities which he was expected thereafter to live down to. It was a cataclysm which he could not avert; but he found a remedy. He became a passive resister to the Education rate, and year by year he placed at the disposal of the distraining authorities a selection of his wedding-presents till his house was purged of them. I have said that you cannot separate Art-training from general education; and here, at all events, you find
