As it is, we drop our robe de nuit like Psyche at the bath—only a little more hurriedly, perhaps—and then we start a deadly wrestle with a set of underwear which has deliberately tied itself up in a series of fancy knots. Our feet stick halfway in, and we stagger about on one foot dragging and moaning, while our epidermis assumes all the colors of a sick chameleon. It is a very painful predicament, mortifying to one's sense of dignity, and hurtful to one's eternal salvation because of the expletives one is sometimes led to blurt out.
And then think of the complication of hose-supports, suspenders, collars and ties, and all the rest of it. Besides, you have probably forgotten to put buttons in a clean shirt the night before, and you have to stand there with palsied fingers babbling in imbecile rage while the studs roll gaily under the bureau. No wonder a man comes down to his breakfast on cold mornings with a seething rage that would make a Prussian hate-party look like a June day in the pigeon-loft.
Who started this ventilation racket, anyway? Our grandfathers had no use for it, Heaven knows. Personally we can recall our paternal grandparent, armed with a large, strong kitchen-knife, shoving gobs of cotton-batting into the cracks around the double-windows, in case a skinny little draught should be able to worm its way in somewhere. And yet the old gentleman was not cut off prematurely by some wasting disease. He celebrated, on the contrary, a very merry ninety-fourth birthday before he went aloft to poke cotton-batting cloudlets, no doubt, into the crevices in the pearly panes of heaven.
We have also known a lot of other vigorous old people who had about as much use for ventilation as they had for a velocipede. Of course, this sort of talk from us sounds very reactionary and benighted and all that, but we can't help recalling that people seemed to live longer and more comfortably in the good old stuffy days than they do now, when a man is a small body of chills entirely surrounded by draughts. Perhaps some brother or sister will rise up in meeting and explain this little matter to us.
Air, fresh air—everyone seems to be shouting for it as though they were Huns caught in a foundered submarine. But old-fashioned business men used to do their work in hermetically sealed offices containing a wood-stove that made the varnish smoke on the furniture. If anyone opened the door wide enough to let in a draught the size of a lead-pencil, they swore at him. And as for opening the windows—only over their dead bodies, that's all! Besides, they were usually nailed down till the next spring.
But your modern business man's ideal seems to be an office that is about as weather-proof as a squirrel-cage. We called on a man the other day, and he was sitting between two wide-open windows with a gale blowing through them that nearly shot us back down the stairs again.
"Great, isn't it?" the Arctic idiot chortled. "Nothing like good fresh air! Keeps up your efficiency, you know, puts pep into you."
We said that obviously a man would have to keep moving if he wanted to save himself from freezing to death in that office. But where did his customers get off? It might be all right for him to freeze out a poor devil of a journalist like ourself, but how about freezing out a pork-packer or a bank-president? Not that we have any painful objection to seeing them frozen, God Wot—we have been frozen out of banks too often ourself.
"Oh, a man's customers come in off the street," he said breezily, "and they're usually wearing their street-clothes, so they're all right."
We took the tip. We buttoned our overcoat, turned up our collar, pulled our hat well down on our head, drew on our gloves, hunched up our back, and were able to talk to him for three minutes about as comfortably as though we were sitting on the top ledge of a sky-scraper in a blizzard. If there's anything we hate, it is a draught in the ear. The only draught we don't object to is the sort that one gets out of a keg, and naturally one doesn't get it in the ear—not unless the party has been going on a long time.