Page:Dan McKenzie - Aromatics and the Soul.pdf/31

Rh 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 wunderclothing 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.

I can myself remember in my younger days in Scotland an old doctor having his first bath in the palatial surroundings of a modern bathroom. Not in his own house, needless to say ! After a patient and particular inspection of all the glittering taps of “shower,” “spray,” “plunge,” and what not, he commended his spirit to the Higher Powers—or rather, I fear, according to his wont, for he was not of the Holy Willie persuasion, to the keeping of those of the Nether Regions. Then he proceeded gingerly to insert into the steaming water first of all his toes, then his feet, next his ankles, and so bit by bit, until, greatly daring, he had Rh