ish family on L700, for you know that
rent and taxes are high and food and clothing dear. If you are a woman
and think about it a great deal, and look at family life in as many
places and classes as you can, you finally decide that there are three
chief reasons for the great difference between the cost of life in
England and Germany. In the first place, labour is cheaper there; in
the second place, the standard of luxury and even of comfort is lower;
in the third place, the women are thriftier and more industrious than
Englishwomen. This, too, leaves out of account the most important
fact, that the State educates a man's children for next to nothing;
and drills the male ones into shape when they serve in the army.

Servants, we have seen, get lower wages than they do here, but the
real economy is in the smaller number kept. Where we pay and maintain
half a dozen a German family will be content with two, and the typical
small English household that cannot face life without its plain cook
in the kitchen and its parlour-maid in her black gown at the front
door, will throughout the German Empire get along quite serenely with
one young woman to cook and clean and do everything else required. If
she is a "pearl" she probably makes the young ladies' frocks and irons
the master's shirts to fill in her time. Germans do not trouble about
the black frock and the white apron at the front door. They will even
open the door to you themselves if the "girl" is washing or cooking.
A female servant is always a "girl" in Germany. I once heard a young
Englishwoman who had not been long in Germany ask an elderly
acquaintance to recommend a dressmaker.

"The best one in ---- is Fraeulein Mueller," said the elderly
acquaintance.

"But she is too expensive," said the Englishwoman, and she glanced
across the room at the lady's nieces, who were neatly and plainly
dressed. "Do girls go to Fraeulein Mueller?"

"Girls! Certainly not," said the lady, with the expression Germans
keep for the insane English it is their fate to encounter
occasionally.

"But that is what I want to know, ... a dressmaker girls go to ...
girls with a small allowance."

"I am afraid I cannot help you," said the lady stiffly. "I know
nothing about the dressmakers girls employ."

"Perhaps Miss Brown means 'young girls,'" said one of the nieces, who
was not as slow in the uptake as her aunt, and it turned out that this
was what Miss Brown did mean; but she had not kn