nwhile, since "one
must live," the nursery that was implicit in the background of the first
picture will probably prove unnecessary. She will be, perforce, a
person not only of pleasant pursuits, but of leisure. If she endears
herself to her husband, he will feel not only the attraction but the
duty of her vacant hours; he will not only deflect his working hours
from the effective to the profitable, but that occasional burning of the
midnight oil, that no brain-worker may forego if he is to retain his
efficiency, will, in the interests of some attractive theatrical
performance or some agreeable social occasion, all too frequently have
to be put off or abandoned.

This line of speculation, therefore, gives us a second picture of a
household to put beside our first, a household, or rather a couple,
rather more likely to be typical of the mass of middling sort of people
in those urban regions of the future than our first projection. It will
probably not live in a separate home at all, but in a flat in "Town," or
at one of the subordinate centres of the urban region we have foreseen.
The apartments will be more or less agreeably adorned in some decorative
fashion akin to but less costly than some of the many fashions that will
obtain among the wealthy. They will be littered with a miscellaneous
literature, novels of an entertaining and stimulating sort
predominating, and with _bric-a-brac_; in a childless household there
must certainly be quaint dolls, pet images, and so forth, and perhaps a
canary would find a place. I suspect there would be an edition or so of
"Omar" about in this more typical household of "Moderns," but I doubt
about the Bible. The man's working books would probably be shabby and
relegated to a small study, and even these overlaid by abundant copies
of the _Financial_--something or other. It would still be a servantless
household, and probably not only without a nursery but without a
kitchen, and in its grade and degree it would probably have social
relations directly or intermediately through rich friends with some
section, some one of the numerous cults of the quite independent
wealthy.

Quite similar households to this would be even more common among those
neither independent nor engaged in work of a primarily functional
nature, but endeavouring quite ostensibly to acquire wealth by political
or business ingenuity and activity, and also among the great multitude
of artists, writers, and that sort of