pired him. It was not paradise. But it was a
temple.

You of the younger generation cannot understand that--without
imagination. I say that the hot-water system of the new house, simple
and primitive as it was, affected and inspired Edwin like a poem. There
was a cistern-room, actually a room devoted to nothing but cisterns, and
the main cistern was so big that the builders had had to install it
before the roof was put on, for it would never have gone through a door.
This cistern, by means of a ball-tap, filled itself from the main
nearly as quickly as it was emptied. Out of it grew pipes, creeping in
secret downwards between inner walls of the house, penetrating
everywhere. One went down to a boiler behind the kitchen-range and
filled it, and as the fire that was roasting the joint heated the
boiler, the water mounted again magically to the cistern-room and filled
another cistern, spherical and sealed, and thence descended, on a third
journeying, to the bath and to the lavatory basin in the bathroom. All
this was marvellous to Edwin; it was romantic. What! A room solely for
baths! And a huge painted zinc bath! Edwin had never seen such a
thing. And a vast porcelain basin, with tiles all round it, in which
you could splash! An endless supply of water on the first floor!

At the shop-house, every drop of water on the first floor had to be
carried upstairs in jugs and buckets; and every drop of it had to be
carried down again. No hot water could be obtained until it had been
boiled in a vessel on the fire. Hot water had the value of champagne.
To take a warm hip-bath was an immense enterprise of heating, fetching,
decanting, and general derangement of the entire house; and at best the
bath was not hot; it always lost its virtue on the stairs and landing.
And to splash--one of the most voluptuous pleasures in life--was
forbidden by the code. Mrs Nixon would actually weep at a splashing.
Splashing was immoral. It was as wicked as amorous dalliance in a
monastery. In the shop-house godliness was child's play compared to
cleanliness.

And the shop-house was so dark! Edwin had never noticed how dark it was
until the new house approached completion. The new house was radiant
with light. It had always, for Edwin, the somewhat blinding brilliance
which filled the sitting-room of the shop-house only when Duck Bank
happened to be covered with fresh snow. And there was a dining-room,
solely for eating, and a