n accepting
a servant's place you accept a servant's limitations.' That finished me.
I loved the children, but I said, 'If you have no other thought of what
I am to the children than that, I had better go.' I went, and she put a
common, uneducated Irish girl in my place. I know a good many who would
take nurse's places, and who are sensible enough not to want to push
into the family life. But the trouble is that almost every one wants to
make a show, and it is more stylish to have the nurse in a cap and
apron, and so she is ordered into them."

"I've tried it," said one who had been a dressmaker and found her health
going from long sitting. "My trouble was, no conscience as to hours; and
I believe you'll find that is, at the bottom, one of the chief
objections. My first employer was a smart, energetic woman, who had done
her own work when she was first married and knew what it meant, or you'd
think she might have known. But she had no more thought for me than if I
had been a machine. She'd sit in her sitting-room on the second floor
and ring for me twenty times a day to do little things, and she wanted
me up till eleven to answer the bell, for she had a great deal of
company. I had a good room and everything nice, and she gave me a great
many things, but I'd have spared them all if only I could have had a
little time to myself. I was all worn out, and at last I had to go.
There was another reason. I had no place but the kitchen to see my
friends. I was thirty years old and as well born and well educated as
she, and it didn't seem right. The mistresses think it's all the girls'
fault, but I've seen enough to know that women haven't found out what
justice means, and that a girl knows it, many a time, better than her
employer. Anyway, you couldn't make me try it again."

"My trouble was," said another, who had been in a cotton-mill and gone
into the home of one of the mill-owners as chambermaid, "I hadn't any
place that I could be alone a minute. We were poor at home, and four of
us worked in the mill, but I had a little room all my own, even if it
didn't hold much. In that splendid big house the servants' room was over
the kitchen,--hot and close in summer, and cold in winter, and four beds
in it. We five had to live there together, with only two bureaus and a
bit of a closet, and one washstand for all. There was no chance to keep
clean or your things in nice order, or anything by yourself, and I gave
up. Then I went int