How can this horror of fresh air among us be explained? If people really enjoy living in overheated rooms with little or no ventilation, why is it that we hear so much complaining, when during the summer months the thermometer runs up into the familiar nineties? Why are children hurried out of town, and why do wives consider it a necessity to desert their husbands?
It's rather inconsistent, to say the least, for not one of those deserters but would "kick" if the theatre or church they attend fell below that temperature in December.
It is impossible to go into our banks and offices and not realize that the air has been breathed again and again, heated and cooled, but never changed, - doors and windows fit too tightly for that.
The pallor and dazed expression of the employees tell the same tale. I spoke to a youth the other day in an office about his appearance and asked if he was ill. "Yes," he answered, "I have had a succession of colds all winter. You see, my desk here is next to the radiator, so I am in a perpetual perspiration and catch cold as soon as I go out. Last winter I passed three months in a farmhouse, where the water froze in my room at night, and we had to wear overcoats to our meals.
Yet I never had a cold there, and gained in weight and strength."
Twenty years ago no "palatial private residence" was considered complete unless there was a stationary washstand (forming a direct connection with the sewer) in each bedroom.
We looked pityingly on foreigners who did not enjoy these advantages, until one day we realized that the latter were in the right, and straightway stationary washstands disappeared.
How much time must pass and how many victims be sacrificed before we come to our senses on the great radiator question?
As a result of our population living in a furnace, it happens now that when you rebel on being forced to take an impromptu Turkish bath at a theatre, the usher answers your complaint with "It can't be as warm as you think, for a lady over there has just told me she felt chilly and asked for more heat!"
Another invention of the enemy is the "revolving door." By this ingenious contrivance the little fresh air that formerly crept into a building is now excluded. Which explains why on entering our larger hotels one is taken by the throat, as it were, by a sickening long-dead atmosphere - in which the souvenir of past meals and decaying flowers floats like a regret - such as explorers must find on opening an Egyptian tomb.
Absurd as it may seem, it has become a distinction to have cool rooms. Alas, they are rare! Those blessed households where one has the delicious sensation of being chilly and can turn with pleasure toward crackling wood! The open fire has become, within the last decade, a test of refinement, almost a question of good breeding, forming a broad distinction between dainty households and vulgar ones, and marking the line which separates the homes of cultivated people from the parlors of those who care only for display.
A drawing-room filled with heat, the source of which remains invisible, is as characteristic of the parvenu as clanking chains on a harness or fine clothes worn in the street.
An open fire is the "eye" of a room, which can no more be attractive without it than the human face can be beautiful if it lacks the visual organs. The "gas fire" bears about the same relation to the real thing as a glass eye does to a natural one, and produces much the same sensation. Artificial eyes are painful necessities in some cases, and therefore cannot be condemned; but the household which gathers complacently around a "gas log" must have something radically wrong with it, and would be capable of worse offences against taste and hospitality.
There is a tombstone in a New England grave-yard the inscription on which reads: "I was well, I wanted to be better. Here I am."
As regards heating of our houses, it's to be feared that we have gone much the same road as the unfortunate New Englander.
I don't mean to imply that he is now suffering from too much heat, but we, as a nation, certainly are.
Janitors and parlor-car conductors have replaced the wicked fairies of other days, but are apparently animated by their malignant spirit, and employ their hours of brief authority as cruelly. No witch dancing around her boiling cauldron was ever more joyful than the fireman of a modern hotel, as he gleefully turns more and more steam upon his helpless victims.
Long acquaintance with that gentleman has convinced me that he cannot plead ignorance as an excuse for falling into these excesses. It is pure, unadulterated perversity, else why should he invariably choose the mildest mornings to show what his engines can do?
Many explanations have been offered for this love of a high temperature by our compatriots. Perhaps the true one has not yet been found. Is it not possible that what appears to be folly and almost criminal negligence of the rules of health, may be, after all, only a commendable ambition to renew the exploits of those biblical heroes, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego?
