d room, and
reflected on the abyss set by prejudice between the ground-floor and
the basement."

"How do you like your new German governess?" I once asked an English
friend who lived in the country and had just engaged a German lady for
her only daughter.

"Oh! I like her," said my friend without enthusiasm. "She is a
brilliant musician and a fine linguist and all that. But she has such
odd ideas about what a girl ought to know. The other day I actually
caught her teaching Patricia to _dust_."

"If you don't watch her," I said, "she'll probably teach Patricia to
cook."

My friend looked anxious first, and then relieved.

"I don't see how she could do that," she said. "The cook would never
have them in the kitchen for five minutes. But now you mention it, I
believe she can cook. When things go wrong she seems to know what has
been done or not done."

"That might be useful," I suggested.

"I don't see it. I expect my cook to know her work, and to do it and
not to rely on me. I've other fish to fry."

But the German housewife expects to have her fingers literally in
every pie even when by rights they should be employed elsewhere. You
hear, for instance, of a great Court functionary whose wife is so
devoted to cooking that though she has a large staff of servants she
cannot be persuaded to spend the day anywhere but in her kitchen.
Mistresses of this kind breed incapable servants, and you find, in
fact, that German maids cannot compare with our English ones in
qualities of self-reliance, method, and initiative. They mostly expect
to be told from hour to hour what to do, and very often to lend a hand
to the ladies of the household rather than to do the thing themselves.
Indeed, though the servants are on duty from morning till night more
than English servants are, in some ways they have an easier time of it
than ours, because they are used so much to run errands and go to
market. Everyone who has been in German towns can remember the hordes
of servants with baskets and big umbrellas strolling in twos and
threes along the streets in the early morning. They are never in any
hurry to get home to work again, and a good many doubtless know that
what they leave undone will be done by their mistress. The German
kitchen with its beautiful cleanliness and brightly polished copper
pans I have described, but I have not said anything yet about the
fidgety housewife who carries her _Tuechtigkeit_ to such a pitch that
she ties