“You might as well include every other ill that flesh is heir to.  If we have got to fight germs day and night in order to live, the cleaner and more open we can keep the battle ground the better.  It strikes me that it might be a good thing to have the whole house sort of clean and wholesome.”

“Of course.  But none of us would like to have the living rooms as absolutely bare of all superfluous furnishing as a hospital ward.  We should not be willing to give up our rugs, take down the curtains, throw away the cushions and sit in hard wooden chairs.”

“No, and I wouldn’t like to burn my books, although there is nothing quite so ‘germy’ as my musty old books that were made in Italy in plague times and smell like the 16th century every time they are opened.  So I suppose we must have a hospital for the children to be sick in, a workshop for them to work in, and what would you say to a small chapel and penitentiary, with a dungeon or two?  While we are about it, let’s have a market and cold storage annex.”

“Precisely what I was going to suggest.  It would be the easiest thing in the world to attach a small room to the cellar or the kitchen, where a low temperature can be kept at all times, either by ice or by the artificial refrigeration that will soon be distributed and sold in the same way that gas, water, steam, electric light and power are now furnished in many cities.”

“I never thought of it before, but why shouldn’t milk and beer and other medicinal drinks be distributed in the same way as water and gas?”

“Please don’t interrupt me.  These are really serious considerations.  Why, Jack, we haven’t begun to guess at the wonderful changes that are to be made in all our housekeeping affairs, as well as in everything else by electricity.  In a few years we shall find our present cooking arrangements as much out of date as the old turnspit and tin ovens and the great wood fires on the hearth.  And light!  Our houses will be as light as day all the time, unless we choose darkness in order to sleep more comfortably.”

“Or because our deeds be evil, or for the better accommodation of burglars.  No self-respecting burglar would think of ‘burgling’ without a dark lantern.”

“And heat; do you remember how something more than twenty-five years ago a French scientist proposed to supply all the heat needed for human comfort in cold climates directly from the sun’s rays?”

“I can’t say that I do remember that particular philosopher, but I have a notion that the sun was considered a fair sort of furnace a good many years before the first Frenchman was born.”

“Yes, yes; but he was going to gather the sun’s heat into such shape that it would warm our houses in winter, do all the cooking, take the place of all the steam boilers and furnaces.  I never heard that his theories were reduced to practice, but we have found another source of light and heat that is already under our control.  There is no more doubt that all the warmth, illumination and mechanical power that we can use are within our reach, when we have learned how to take possession of them, than there is of gravitation.  It is all waiting at the door, we have only to clap our hands and the potent spirit is ready to do our bidding.”