copying for us, and all is perfectly
pleasant and agreeable in our mutual relations; but the case would be
far otherwise were she to take it into her head that we treated her
with contempt, because my wife did not call on her, and because she
was not occasionally invited to tea. Besides, I apprehend that a
woman of quick sensibilities, employed in domestic service, and who
was so far treated as a member of the family as to share our table,
would find her position even more painful and embarrassing than if
she took once for all the position of a servant. We could not
control the feelings of our friends; we could not always insure
that they would be free from aristocratic prejudice, even were we so
ourselves. We could not force her upon their acquaintance, and she
might feel far more slighted than she would in a position where no
attentions of any kind were to be expected. Besides which, I have
always noticed that persons standing in this uncertain position are
objects of peculiar antipathy to the servants in full; that they
are the cause of constant and secret cabals and discontents; and that
a family where the two orders exist has always raked up in it the
smouldering embers of a quarrel ready at any time to burst out
into open feud."

"Well," said I, "here lies the problem of American life. Half our
women, like Marianne, are being faded and made old before their time
by exhausting endeavors to lead a life of high civilization and
refinement with only such untrained help as is washed up on our shores
by the tide of emigration. Our houses are built upon a plan that
precludes the necessity of much hard labor, but requires rather
careful and nice handling. A well-trained, intelligent woman, who had
vitalized her finger-ends by means of a well-developed brain, could do
all the work of such a house with comparatively little physical
fatigue. So stands the case as regards our houses. Now, over against
the women that are perishing in them from too much care, there is
another class of American women that are wandering up and down,
perishing for lack of some remunerating employment. That class of
women, whose developed brains and less developed muscles mark them as
peculiarly fitted for the performance of the labors of a high
civilization, stand utterly aloof from paid domestic service. Sooner
beg, sooner starve, sooner marry for money, sooner hang on as
dependents in families where they know they are not wanted, than
accept o