Read the passage carefully and choose the best answer.
Comfort is now one of the causes of its own spread. It has now become a physical habit, a fashion, an ideal to be pursued for its own sake. The more comfort is brought into the world, the more it is likely to be valued. To those who have known comfort, discomfort is real torture. The fashion which now decreases the worship of comfort is quite as imperious as any other fashion. Moreover, enormous material interests are bound up with the supply of means of comfort. The manufacturers of furniture, of heating apparatus, of plumbing fixtures cannot afford to let the live of comfort die. In modern advertisement, they have found a means of compelling it to live and grow. A man of means today, who builds a house, is in general concerned primarily with the comfort of his future residence, he will spend a great deal of money on room air-conditioning and interior decoration, and having spent he will regard his house as perfect. His counterpart in an earlier age would have been primarily concerned with the impressiveness and magnificence of his dwelling with beauty, in a word, rather than comfort. The money our contemporary would spend on decoration and air-conditioning would have been spent on marble staircases, frescoes, pictures and statutes. I am inclined to think that our present passion for comfort is little exaggerated. Though I personally enjoy comfort, I have lived most happily in a house devoid of everything that Anglo-Saxon deem indispensable. However, comfort for me has justification: it facilitates mental life. Discomfort handicaps thought; it is difficult to use the mind when the body is cold and aching
