The breakfast will be of uncooked or simply heated food, parched grains and cream, fruit fresh or dried, and nuts.  If coffee or cocoa is desired, the electric heater serves it to the requisite degree of heat.  Each adult member of the family will probably take this in his own room or at his own convenience, without the formality of a meal.  The few glasses and other dishes may be plunged into a tank of water and left for future cleaning.  Luncheon will depend altogether on the habits of the family, but dinner, at whatever hour that may be, will be the family symposium.  Dressed in its honor, with a sprightly addition to the conversation of experience or information or conjecture, there will be form and ceremony of a simple, refined kind, such that once again the family may welcome a guest without anxiety.  Good conversation and fresh interests will thus come into the children’s lives.  How much they have missed in these days of the barring out all hospitality!  Is it perchance one reason, if not the chief, why manners have degenerated?

This meal will not have more than four courses of food carefully selected and perfectly cooked, whether in the house or out matters not so it is served fresh and of just the right temperature.  No kind of cooking will be permitted which “meets the guest in the hall and stays with him in the street”; therefore the dishes may be washed by neatly dressed maids or by the children, who thus learn to care for the fitness of things; plenty of towels and hot water, with all hands doing a little, leaves everything snug and no one too tired.  We will let Mr. H.G.  Wells describe the bedroom of the future house:[1]

[Footnote 1:  A Modern Utopia, p. 103.]

“The room is, of course, very clear and clean and simple:  not by any means cheaply equipped, but designed to economize the labor of redding and repair just as much as possible.

“It is beautifully proportioned and rather lower than most rooms I know on earth.  There is no fireplace, and I am perplexed by that until I find a thermometer beside six switches on the wall.  Above this switchboard is a brief instruction:  one switch warms the floor, which is not carpeted, but covered by a substance like soft oilcloth; one warms the mattress (which is of metal with resistance coils threaded to and fro in it); and the others warm the wall in various degrees, each directing current through a separate system of resistances.  The casement does not open, but above, flush with the ceiling, a noiseless rapid fan pumps air out of the room.  The air enters by a Tobin shaft.

“There is a recess dressing-room, equipped with a bath and all that is necessary to one’s toilet; and the water, one remarks, is warmed, if one desires it warm, by passing it through an electrically-heated spiral of tubing.  A cake of soap drops out of a store-machine on the turn of a handle, and when you have done with it, you drop that and your soiled towels, etc., which are also given you by machines, into a little box, through the bottom of which they drop at once and sail down a smooth shaft. [Better stay in the box and not infect the shaft.—­Author.]