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The use of the domestic bath is, we must not forget, a social revolution of our own day and generation. Our grandfathers ventured upon a bath only when it seemed to be called for—by others. Our grandmothers, with their clean, white cotton or linen undergarments, had, or thought they had, even less need for it. Besides, in their prim and bashful eyes the necessary denudation antecedent to total immersion would have amounted, even when they were alone, to something like gross indecency. Before their time, again, in the eighteenth century, matters were even worse, for the society ladies of that day painted their faces instead of washing them, and mitigated the effects of seldom-changed underclothing by copiously drenching themselves with musk and other reliable perfumes. (I am told, however, that even to-day fashionable ladies refrain from washing their faces!)

The domestic bathroom is the direct offspring of the gravitation water-supply and the modern system of drainage. Buy an old house, and you will have to convert one of the bedrooms into your bathroom, and, to this day, you must carry your bath with you if you go to reside in certain of the Oxford colleges.