"And I suppose you would have ancestral portraits supplied along with the
other pictures?" I sneered.

"Ancestral portraits, of course," said my friend, with unruffled temper.
"So few people have ancestors of their own that they will be very glad to
have ancestral portraits chosen for them out of the collections of the
company or the state. The agents of the one, or the officers of the
other, will study the existing type of family face, and will select
ancestors and ancestresses whose modelling, coloring, and expression
agree with it, and will keep in view the race and nationality of the
family whose ancestral portraits are to be supplied, so that there shall
be no chance of the grossly improbable effect which ancestral portraits
now have in many cases. Yes, I see no flaw in the scheme," my friend
concluded, "and no difficulty that can't be easily overcome. We must
alienate our household furniture, and make it so sensitively and
exclusively the property of some impersonal agency--company or community,
I don't care which--that any care of it shall be a sort of crime; any
sense of responsibility for its preservation a species of incivism
punishable by fine or imprisonment. This, and nothing short of it, will
be the salvation of the eternal-womanly."

"And the perdition of something even more precious than that!"

"What can be more precious?"

"Individuality."

"My dear friend," demanded my visitor, who had risen, and whom I was
gradually edging to the door, "do you mean to say there is any