When I returned to England I came across a terrific establishment. As it may be more or less novel to you I will attempt to describe it, though the really right words for describing it do not exist in the English language. In the first place, it is a restaurant, where meals are served at almost any hour—and not meals such as you get in ordinary restaurants, but sane meals, spread amid flowers and diaper. Then it is also a crÈche, where babies are tended upon scientific principles; nothing that a baby needs is neglected. Older, children are also looked after, and the whole question of education is deeply studied, and advice given. Also young men and women of sixteen or so are started in the world, and every information concerning careers is collected and freely given out.

Another branch of the establishment is devoted to inexpensive but effective dressmaking, and still another to hats; here you will find the periodical literature of fashion, and all hints as to shopping. There is, further, a very efficient department of mending, highly curious and ingenious, which embraces men’s clothing. I discovered, too, a horticultural department for the encouragement of flowers, serving secondarily as a branch of the crÈche and nursery. There is a fine art department, where reproductions of the great masters are to be seen and meditated upon, and an applied art department, full of antiques. It must mention the library, where the latest and the most ancient literatures fraternise on the same shelves; also the chamber-music department.

Lastly, a portion of the establishment is simply nothing but an uncommon lodging-house for travellers, where electric light, hot water bottles, and hot baths are not extras. I scarcely expect you to believe what I say; nevertheless I have exaggerated in nothing. You would never guess where I encountered this extraordinary, this incredible establishment. It was No. 137 (the final number) in a perfectly ordinary long street in a residential suburb of a large town. When I expressed my surprise to the manager of the place, he looked at me as if I had come from Timbuctoo. “Why!” he exclaimed, “there are a hundred and thirty-six establishments much like mine in this very street!” He was right; for what I had stumbled into was just the average cultivated Englishman’s home.

You must look at it as I looked at it in order to perceive what an organisation the thing is. The Englishman may totter continually on the edge of his income, but he does get value for his money. I do not mean the poor man, for he is too unskilled, and too hampered by lack of capital, to get value even for what money he has. Nor do I mean the wealthy man, who usually spends about five-sixths of his income in acquiring worries and nuisances. I mean the nice, usual professional or business islander, who by means of a small oblong piece of paper, marked £30 or so, once a month, attempts and accomplishes more than a native of the mainland would dream of on £30 a week. The immense pyramid which that man and his wife build, wrong side up, on the blowsy head of one domestic servant is a truly astonishing phenomenon, and its frequency does not impair its extraordinariness.

The mere machinery is tremendously complex. You lie awake at 6-30 in the uncommon lodging-house department, and you hear distant noises. It is the inverted apex of the pyramid starting into life. You might imagine that she would be intensely preoccupied by the complexity of her duties, and by her responsibility. Not a bit. Open her head, and you would find nothing in it but the vision of a grocer’s assistant and a new frock. You then hear weird bumps and gurgling noises. It is the hot water running up behind walls to meet you half-way from the kitchen. You catch the early vivacity of the crÈche. A row overhead means that a young man who has already studied the comparative anatomy of cigars is embarking on life. A tinkling of cymbals below—it is a young woman preparing to be attractive to some undiscovered young man in another street.

The Englishman’s home is assuredly the most elaborate organisation for sustaining and reproducing life in the world—or at any rate, east of Sandy Hook. It becomes more and more elaborate, luxurious, and efficient. For example, illumination is not the most important of its activities. Yet, you will generally find in it four different methods of illumination—electricity, gas, a few oil lamps in case of necessity, and candles stuck about. Only yesterday, as it seems, human fancy had not got beyond candles. Much the same with cookery. Even at a simple refection like afternoon tea you may well have jam boiled over gas, cake baked in the range, and tea kept hot by alcohol or electricity.

I am not old, but I have known housewives who would neither eat nor offer to a guest, bread which they had not baked. They drew water from their own wells. And the idea of a public laundry would have horrified them. And before that generation there existed a generation which spun and wove at home. To-day the English household is dependent on cooperative methods for light, heat, much food, and several sorts of cleanliness. True (though it has abandoned baking), the idea of cooperative cookery horrifies it! However, another generation is coming! And that generation, while expending no more energy than ourselves, will live in homes more complicatedly luxurious than ours. When it is house-hunting it will turn in scorn from an abode which has not a service of hot and cold water in every bedroom and a steam device for “washing up” without human fingers. And it will as soon think of keeping a private orchestra as of keeping a private cook—with her loves and her thirst.

Leave England and come hack, and you cannot fail to see that this generation is already knocking at the door. When it once gets inside the door it will probably be more “house-proud,” more inclined to regard the dwelling as its toy, with which it can never tire of playing, than even the present generation. Such is a salient characteristic which strikes the returned traveller, and which the foreigner goes back to his own country and talks about—namely, the tremendous and intense pre-occupation of the English home with “comfort”—with every branch and sub-branch of comfort.

“Le comfort anglais” is a phrase which has passed into the French language. On spiritual and intellectual matters the Englishman may be the most sweetly reasonable of creatures—always ready to compromise, and loathing discussion. But catch him compromising about his hot-water apparatus, the texture of a beefsteak, or the flushing of a cistern!