I S it the result of a conspiracy on the part of those who build 
houses, or because we Americans have a penchant for vast 
distances, or because so many city dwellers have wearied of the 
diminutive flats, that the passion for the little room would seem 
to have passed ? Is there a movement nowadays to relegate it to 
the limbo of the forgotten and inefficient? Frankly, one can look 
for hours over the plans of modern suburban houses and find all 
too rare provision made for the little room that shall serve as the 
master's den or the mistress’ study. Perhaps the joy and advan¬ 
tage of privacy are not yet altogether appreciated here; perhaps 
men and women think there is no longer need for one going off 
apart. Whatever it is, the fact remains that the little room which 
is one’s own — be that one man or woman — should be brought 
again into favor, should be given a place in the modern scheme of 
things. For it has a role not to be gainsaid when one is planning 
for that work and play of everyday life a home is supposed to 
enshrine. 
Into the office recently drifted a man who had just rid himself 
of an abomination of desolations — two towering cathedral cande¬ 
labra that an uncle, whose will purported him to have been of 
sound and disposing mind and memory, did, upon his decease, 
make, publish and declare to be his. After trying them in several 
quarters of his menage, he finally resigned to the inexorable and 
harbored the incubi in opposite corners of his study. Now his 
study is ten paces long and eight wide, and contains, in addition 
to bookcases ranging shoulder-high around the walls, a table, a 
writing desk, two small chairs, a couch and a piano — furnishings 
with which he has lived on amicable terms for some years. But 
so soon as those gorgeous skyscraping candelabra were intro¬ 
duced, the room was hurled into a chaos of disproportionment, 
into mental cacophony. They blatted a brassy, Straussian dis¬ 
sonance that drowned out his own peaceful, humdrum orchestra¬ 
tion. Finally, after many weeks of holding his peace, this poor 
fellow snapped his fingers in the face of Ancient and Honorable 
Art—had the avuncular legacy carted off to a church. When 
they bumped sullenly down the stairs, he closed his study door 
with relief: hostilities had ceased, peace had settled down once 
more. But the contrast made the secret plain — he was able to 
live intimately with his room and the things in it because it and 
they were diminutive. 
By its very nature does the diminutive appeal for intimacy. It 
would seem to have no desire for overpowering or overaweing. 
It dwells in peace — willing, helpful, unobtrusive. It permits mu¬ 
tual toleration of personalities. On the other hand, try as one 
will, the lumbering, the huge, the Garagantuan, can never be play¬ 
mate nor workfellow. And this is as true of a room and its con¬ 
tents as of anything else in life. 
To dwell at peace with one’s room — a consummation certainly 
to be wished—one must be the most attractive, the most potent 
thing in it. And it follows, as a logical corollary, that a man 
would find it very difficult to be a nonentity in a small room, since, 
perforce, he is the dominant thing there. It was the overaweing 
of the cathedral candelabra that had thrown the study mentioned 
above into a chaos of disproportionment. 
And the secret of living at peace in a little room is that one 
must do so of his own volition. The narrow cell of the prisoner 
cramps because he dwells in it against his will, whereas the narrow 
cell of the nun is a lovesome spot because she wants to live in it. 
The former has his material limitations forced upon him; the 
latter knows no material limitations. In the last analysis a man 
must be larger of soul than is the room of proportions in which 
he dwells. 
The small room is generally decried because of its alleged abun¬ 
dance of disadvantages. There is no space for spread of elbows,, 
no chance for arrangement of furniture. Quite the contrary;: 
there are innumerable advantages, advantages transcending walls 
and furniture, advantages of the sort every thinking man and 
woman can and does appreciate. 
It fosters an intimacy with one's work. That master of many 
arts, Leonardo de Vinci, once observed, “Small rooms or dwell¬ 
ings set the mind in the right path, large ones cause it to go 
astray.” Flow well he knew the waste of potential energy conse¬ 
quent on living in a big room! Truly, to live in a large room is 
to put too much cosmos into one’s ego. 
Greater far than the ability to concentrate and to be intimate 
with the inanimate that a small room permits is the intimacy it 
affords humans. For intimacy between man and man presupposes- 
limitations and confines, walls that are as close as kinship itself. 
Where lives the man wdio can be intimate with another in a 
large room? Meet an old friend in an apartment of long vistas,, 
and straightway you retire to a corner! Meet one toward whom, 
you take an instinctive dislike, and no amount of alluring cush¬ 
ioned corners will entice you from the center of that room. Spa¬ 
ciousness is the environment for the stranger; propinquity for the 
friend. The canny prefer not to receive a stranger in a little 
room. Such a reception necessitates an intimacy unwarranted 
and undesired. Friendship begins as, when the breach between, 
stranger and stranger narrows, the host opens the door of his- 
little room and bids you enter. 
When he wrote to his Eliza, Lawrence Sterne apparently knew 
all about these things. The words may not be familiar. Having; 
expatiated in his “Journal” on various subjects, he writes: “I 
have made you a sweet Sitting-Room (as I told you already) and 
am projecting a good bedchamber adjoining it, with a pretty 
Dressing-Room for You which connects them together — and wheru 
they are furnished will be as sweet a set of romantic apartments as- 
you ever beheld. The Sleeping-Room will be large. The Dress¬ 
ing-Room, through which you pass into yr. Temple, will be small; 
but big enough to hold a dressing table, a couple of chairs, with 
room for yr. nymph to stand at her ease both behind and on either 
side of you — with spare room to hang a dozen petticoats, gowns, 
etc., and shelves for as many bandboxes. . . . Yr. Little Temple I 
have described and what it will hold; but if it ever holds you and' 
I, Eliza, the room will not be too little for us ” 
With Jovian conviction and finality do those who make rooms 
their calling declare that if one insists upon living in a cubby hole, 
he must keep it orderly ; he must take care that he does not mix his. 
“periods”; he must so conserve space that when he walks around 
his room he will not interfere with the furniture. Herein lies a 
Habakkukian didacticism that should be denied by everyone who. 
knows the secret of living. For the charm of a small room is that 
it possesses all those elements a stately room has not — small pro¬ 
portions, a maze of tables and chairs through which one can pick 
his way when thinking, and, above all things, a touch of that 
nonchalant disorder which gives to a room the undeniable atmos¬ 
phere of being lived in. 
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