, because after having been for a
century or more in disuse, they are again being chosen. Perhaps one might
say that the "second choice" is "proof of excellence."

=SERVICE=

The subject of furnishings is however the least part of this
chapter--appointments meaning decoration being of less importance (since
this is not a book on architecture or decoration!), than appointments
meaning _service_.

But before going into the various details of service, it might be a good
moment to speak of the unreasoning indignity cast upon the honorable
vocation of a servant.

There is an inexplicable tendency, in this country only, for working
people in general to look upon domestic service as an unworthy, if not
altogether degrading vocation. The cause may perhaps be found in the fact
that this same scorning public having for the most part little opportunity
to know high-class servants, who are to be found only in high-class
families, take it for granted that ignorant "servant girls" and "hired
men" are representative of their kind. Therefore they put upper class
servants in the same category--regardless of whether they are uncouth and
illiterate, or persons of refined appearance and manner who often have
considerable cultivation, acquired not so much at school as through the
constant contact with ultra refinement of surroundings, and not
infrequently through the opportunity for world-wide travel.

And yet so insistently has this obloquy of the word "servant" spread that
every one sensitive to the feelings of others avoids using it exactly as
one avoids using the word "cripple" when speaking to one who is slightly
lame. Yet are not the best of us "servants" in the Church? And the highest
of us "servants" of the people and the State?

To be a slattern in a vulgar household is scarcely an elevated employment,
but neither is working in a sweat-shop, or belonging to a calling that is
really degraded; which is otherwise about all that equal lack of ability
would procure. On the other hand, consider the vocation of a lady's maid
or "_courier_" valet and compare the advantages these enjoy (to say
nothing of their never having to worry about overhead expenses), with the
opportunities of those who have never been out of the "factory" or the
"store" or further away than the adjoining town in their lives. As for a
nurse, is there any vocation more honorable? No character in E.F. Benson's
"Our Family Affairs" is more beautiful or more tende