I could not forbear to interrupt. "Have you and these people," I
said, "no stomachs--no apparatus?"

"Of course we have," he answered, "but we use it to some purpose.
Mine is largely filled with my education--but there! I am
anticipating again. Better let me go on as I was. Chemical Food came
first: that cut off almost one-third of the work, and then came
Asbestos Clothes. That was wonderful! In one year humanity made
enough suits to last for ever and ever. That, of course, could never
have been if it hadn't been connected with the revolt of women and the
fall of Fashion."

"Have the Fashions gone," I asked, "that insane, extravagant idea
of----" I was about to launch into one of my old-time harangues about
the sheer vanity of decorative dress, when my eye rested on the moving
figures in asbestos, and I stopped.

"All gone," said the Man in Asbestos. "Then next to that we killed,
or practically killed, the changes of climate. I don't think that in
your day you properly understood how much of your work was due to the
shifts of what you called the weather. It meant the need of all
kinds of special clothes and houses and shelters, a wilderness of
work. How dreadful it must have been in your day--wind and storms,
great wet masses--what did you call them?--clouds--flying through
the air, the ocean full of salt, was it not?--tossed and torn by the
wind, snow thrown all over everything, hail, rain--how awful!"

"Sometimes," I said, "it was very beautiful. But how did you alter
it?"