WINDOWS
Without windows there would be no fresh-air fiends. A single window may make or mar a whole household. Used occasionally by burglars, small boys and lovers, the singular power of the window to control our destiny has not hitherto been recognized. Without windows there would be no ghost stories, for how could the rain beat on the pane, or the wind come in short gusts through the cracks? Neither would there be melodrama, for how could the heroine crouch on the floor if there were no sudden flashes of lighting or falling snow to gaze at through the window? What poems have been written by just looking through a window; and as for literature in general, who does not remember the window in Thrums? The first thing we look at upon entering a room is the windows. At night the window is the last thing we adjust, and in the morning the first we gaze out of. The first window was the beginning of civilization. Consider the window of a cell, how symbolic it is of a dwarfed and misdirected life. The composite health of any community can almost be predicated upon the number of its windows that are kept open at night.
Then there are the windows of the soul, without which no best seller would be worth the price of admission.