“Yes,” said my friend, quite as I had said already, “I see what you mean.  But I think it is in the air more than in the blood.  I was in Paris, about this time last year, perhaps because I was the only thing in my house that had not been swathed in cheese-cloth, or tied up in a bag with drawstrings, or rolled up with moth-balls and put away in chests.  At any rate, I was there.  One day I left my wife in New York carefully tagging three worn-out feather dusters, and putting them into a pillow-case, and tagging it, and putting the pillow-case into a camphorated self-sealing paper sack, and tagging it; and another day I was in Paris, dining at the house of a lady whom I asked how she managed with the things in her house when she went into the country for the summer.  ’Leave them just as they are,’ she said.  ’But what about the dust and the moths, and the rust and the tarnish?’ She said, ’Why, the things would have to be all gone over when I came back in the autumn, anyway, and why should I give myself double trouble?’ I asked her if she didn’t even roll anything up and put it away in closets, and she said:  ’Oh, you mean that old American horror of getting ready to go away.  I used to go through all that at home, too, but I shouldn’t dream of it here.  In the first place, there are no closets in the house, and I couldn’t put anything away if I wanted to.  And really nothing happens.  I scatter some Persian powder along the edges of things, and under the lower shelves, and in the dim corners, and I pull down the shades.  When I come back in the fall I have the powder swept out, and the shades pulled up, and begin living again.  Suppose a little dust has got in, and the moths have nibbled a little here and there?  The whole damage would not amount to half the cost of putting everything away and taking everything out, not to speak of the weeks of discomfort, and the wear and tear of spirit.  No, thank goodness—­I left American housekeeping in America.’  I asked her:  ‘But if you went back?’ and she gave a sigh, and said: 

“’I suppose I should go back to that, along with all the rest.  Everybody does it there.’  So you see,” my friend concluded, “it’s in the air, rather than the blood.”

“Then your famous specific is that our eternal-womanly should go and live in Paris?”

“Oh, dear, not” said my friend.  “Nothing so drastic as all that.  Merely the extinction of household property.”

“I see what you mean,” I said.  “But—­what do you mean?”

“Simply that hired houses, such as most of us live in, shall all be furnished houses, and that the landlord shall own every stick in them, and every appliance down to the last spoon and ultimate towel.  There must be no compromise, by which the tenant agrees to provide his own linen and silver; that would neutralize the effect I intend by the expropriation of the personal proprietor, if that says what I mean.  It must be in the lease, with severe penalties against the