"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."