as a wonderful girl, too,"
pursued Mrs. Salisbury, "but we only had her two months. Then she got a
place where there were no children, and left on two days' notice. And
when I think of the others!--the Hungarian girl who boiled two pairs of
Fred's little brown socks and darkened the entire wash, sheets and
napkins and all! And the colored girl who drank, and the girl who gave
us boiled rice for dessert whenever I forgot to tell her anything else!
And then Dad and I never will forget the woman who put pudding sauce on
his mutton--dear me, dear me!" And Mrs. Salisbury laughed out at the
memory. "Between her not knowing one thing, and not understanding a
word we said, she was pretty trying all around!" she presently added.
"And, of course, the instant you have them really trained they leave;
and that's the end of that! One left me the day Stan was born, and
another--and she was a nice girl, too--simply departed when you three
were all down with scarlet fever, and left her bed unmade, and the tea
cup and saucer from her breakfast on the end of the kitchen table!
Luckily we had a wonderful nurse, and she simply took hold and saved
the day."

"Isn't it a wonder that there isn't a training school for house
servants?" Sandy had inquired, youthful interest in her eye.

"There's no such thing," her mother assured her positively, "as getting
one who knows her business! And why? Why, because all the smart girls
prefer to go into factories, and slave away for three or four dollars a
week, instead of coming into good homes! Do Pearsall and Thompson ever
have any difficulty in getting girls for the glove factory? Never!
There's a line of them waiting, a block long, every time they
advertise. But you may make up your mind to it, dear, if you get a good
cook, she's wasteful or she's lazy, or she's irritable, or dirty, or
she won't wait on table, or she slips out at night, and laughs under
street lamps with some man or other! She's always on your mind, and
she's always an irritation."

"It just shows what a hopelessly stupid class you have to deal with,
Mother," the younger Sandy had said. But at eighteen, she was not so
sure.

Alexandra frankly hated housework, and she did not know how to cook.
She did not think it strange that it was hard to find a clever and
well-trained young woman who would gladly spend all her time in
housework and cooking for something less than three hundred dollars a
year. Her eyes were beginning to be open