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Page 36
"All right. You shall have Bob and the express wagon to-morrow. What
next, Jill?"
"'I should be glad to know your feeling in regard to height of rooms,
but shall not promise fully to agree with you. My purpose is to make
the principal rooms of the first story ten and a-half or eleven feet
high.'"
"Oh, how dreadful! I don't know how high eleven feet is, but I'm sure
they ought not to be more than seven feet."
"I thought you were going to say not less than fourteen," said Jim.
"Oh, no, indeed! Low rooms are so deliciously quaint and cosy."
"But I should be all the time expecting to hit my head."
"You wouldn't think of that for a moment if you could only feel the
influence of Kitty Kane's library. It is a copy of an old English
bar-room, or something of that sort, I don't exactly remember what, but
it is in the Queen Anne style, and it's too lovely for anything. Please
have low rooms, Jill."
Jill continued reading: "For rooms of ordinary sizes and devoted to
ordinary domestic purposes, that is high enough for use, for comfort
and for any reasonable amount of decoration, either upon the walls
themselves or in the shape of pictures or other ornaments. You will
certainly think it enough when you are climbing the stairs to the rooms
of the second story. It may be practicable to reduce the height of some
of the smaller apartments, but it is usually much more convenient to
keep the ceilings of the main rooms of uniform height, even if this
does upset the 'correct proportion' which critics attempt in vain to
establish. To make ceilings very low seems an affectation of humility
or of antiquity not justified by common sense. In the polar regions,
where the sun never reaches an altitude above twenty-three degrees, low
rooms and short windows would be entirely satisfactory. In the torrid
zone, where it is not safe to build more than one story for fear of
earthquakes and tornadoes, where chambers would be useless, and where
the grand question is not how to keep warm but how to keep cool, the
higher the better. For houses in the temperate zones the medium height
is the safest, the best--and the most _artistic_. If any one dares to
say it is not, ask him to tell you the reason why."
"How perfectly _exasperating_," said Bessie in a tragic aside to Jim.
"No one ought to try to give reasons in art, in religion or in
politics. Intuitions are so much more satisfactory. Don't you _always_
rely on your intuitions, Mr. James?"
"Perhaps I should if I had them, but somehow I--I never seem to have
any."
"The meeting appears to be divided," said Jack. "Bessie says seven, Jim
says fourteen. Suppose we split the difference and call it ten and a
half."
"That is, we advise the architect to do as he pleases, then he will be
sure to follow our advice."
CHAPTER XI.
WHAT SHALL WE STAND UPON?
"Splitting the difference" is a convenient compromise, but it is not
always creditable to both parties, and Jill thought it would not be
safe with such advisers to assume that Wisdom's house is always built
between two extremes. She felt, too, that the architect's discussion of
details must be tiresome to her guests, and therefore resolved to take
up but one more of his queries, spending the remainder of the evening
in looking over plans and letters, of which she had an ample store
still unexplored, or in listening to Bessie's ardent description of the
treasures she hoped to find in the lofty recesses of the old garrets.
"I fear the next topic will not be deeply interesting, but it is the
last one to-night, and Jack _must_ give me his undivided attention if
he wishes to know what we are to stand upon in the new house."
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