need not be hard nor unpleasant; very little harder and no more
unpleasant than the lot of the young "lady" who is paying from L60 to
L80 per annum to learn cookery, laundry and housework at a school of
domestic economy. Properly conducted, the relations between employer
and employee, "mistress" and "servant," are those of mutual aid. Such
relations _may_ be, and too often _are_, those of an inefficient
little drudge for a "mistress" almost equally ignorant and
inefficient. But when the employer is an intelligent woman with a
sense of justice (I prefer a sense of justice to sentimental theories
about sisterhood--people do not always treat their sisters justly) the
weekly money payment and food will be but a small part of the girl's
wage. In addition she will receive a training that will equip her for
the "higher" branches of domestic service, or for homemaking on her
own account. Not every girl has the sense to appreciate this when she
gets it, nor the intelligence to profit by it; while it is certainly
rather trying to the employer when the girl is "all agog" to "better
herself" as soon as she has gained a bare smattering of how to do
certain things properly. But all this is "the fortune of war." Some
girls never cease to be grateful to their first teachers and leave
them reluctantly, while other girls never realise that they have
anything to be grateful for. When gratitude and affection come they
are pleasant to receive. But the motive power of the really
conscientious woman is not the expectation of gratitude or affection.

A word to the unconventional homemaker. The young "general" is a bird
of passage. Age and experience bring with them the necessity of
earning more, and if her first employer cannot periodically raise the
girl's wages the latter must in time seek better paid employment,
probably with a mistress who is not unconventional. It is unkind,
therefore, to refrain from teaching the girl how she will be expected
to do things in the ordinary conventional house. I do not mean that
the employer ought to slavishly run her home on conventional lines for
the instruction of her "help." But it is kinder, for instance, to help
a girl regard a cap and apron with good-humoured indifference, or as
on a par with a nurse's uniform, rather than as "a badge of
servitude." It is kinder, too, to show her that it is not only
"servants" who are expected to address their employers as "Sir" and
"Ma'am," but that well-mannered yo