The Professors House
had carpentered under a succession of cooks, went
up to the bath-room on the second floor, where there
was only a painted tin tub; the taps were so old that
no plumber could ever screw them tight enough to
stop the drip, the window could only be coaxed up
and down by wriggling, and the doors of the linen
closet didn’t fit. He had sympathized with his
daughters’ dissatisfaction, though he could never
quite agree with them that the bath should be the
most attractive room in the house.
He had spent
the happiest years of his youth in a house at Versailles where it distinctly was not, and he had known
many charming people who had no bath at all.
However, as his wife said:
“If your country has
contributed one thing, at least, to civilization, why
not have it?”
Many a night, after blowing out
his study lamp, he had leaped into that tub, clad
in his pyjamas, to give it another coat of some one
of the many paints that were advertised to behave
like porcelain, and didn’t.
The Professor in pyjamas was not an unpleasant sight; for looks, the fewer clothes he had on, the better. Anything that clung to his body showed it to be built upon extremely good bones, with the slender hips and springy shoulders of a tireless swimmer. Though he was born on Lake Michigan, of mixed stock (Canadian French on one side, and American farmers on the other), St. Peter was commonly said to look like a Spaniard. That was possibly because
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