fancy dress. If no caps
are worn the hair must be faultlessly smooth and neat; and of course where
two or more maids are seen together, they must be alike. It would not do
to have one wear a cap and the other not.

=THE LADY'S MAID=

A first class lady's maid is required to be a hairdresser, a good packer
and an expert needlewoman. Her first duty is to keep her lady's clothes in
order and to help her dress, and undress. She draws the bath, lays out
underclothes, always brushes her lady's hair and usually dresses it, and
gets out the dress to be worn, as well as the stockings, shoes, hat, veil,
gloves, wrist bag, parasol, or whatever accessories go with the dress in
question.

As soon as the lady is dressed, everything that has been worn is taken to
the sewing room and each article is gone over, carefully brushed if of
woolen material, cleaned if silk. Everything that is mussed is pressed,
everything that can be suspected of not being immaculate is washed or
cleaned with cleaning fluid, and when in perfect order is replaced where
it belongs in the closet. Underclothes as mended are put in the clothes
hamper. Stockings are looked over for rips or small holes, and the maid
usually washes very fine stockings herself, also lace collars or small
pieces of lace trimming.

Some maids have to wait up at night, no matter how late, until their
ladies return; but as many, if not more, are never asked to wait longer
than a certain hour.

But the maid for a debutante in the height of the season, between the
inevitable "go fetching" at this place and that, and mending of party
dresses danced to ribbons and soiled by partner's hands on the back, and
slippers "walked on" until there is quite as much black part as satin or
metal, has no sinecure.

_Why Two Maids?_

In very important houses where mother and daughters go out a great deal
there are usually two maids, one for the mother and one for the daughters.
But even in moderate households it is seldom practical for a debutante and
her mother to share a maid--at least during the height of the season. That
a maid who has to go out night after night for weeks and even months on
end, and sit in the dressing-rooms at balls until four and five and even
six in the morning, is then allowed to go to bed and to sleep until
luncheon is merely humane. And it can easily be seen that it is more
likely that she will need the help of a seamstress to refurbish
dance-frocks, than that she