grace the female mind, this
latter point of view always strikes me as being the most complete. I
artfully lead my fair friend on to tell me all about her woes, and she is
sure to be exquisitely one-sided and quite unconscious of her position.
"They are so extravagant, take so little interest in my things, and leave
me at a moment's notice, if they get an idea I am going to break up.
Horrid things! I wish I could do without them! They cause me endless
worry and annoyance." My friend is very nearly right,--but with whom
lies the fault?

The conditions were bad enough years ago, when servants were kept for
decades in the same family, descending like heirlooms from father to son,
often (abroad) being the foster sisters or brothers of their masters, and
bound to the household by an hundred ties of sympathy and tradition. But
in our day, and in America, where there is rarely even a common language
or nationality to form a bond, and where households are broken up with
such facility, the relation between master and servant is often so
strained and so unpleasant that we risk becoming (what foreigners
reproach us with being), a nation of hotel-dwellers. Nor is this class-
feeling greatly to be wondered at. The contrary would be astonishing.
From the primitive household, where a poor neighbor comes in as "help,"
to the "great" establishment where the butler and housekeeper eat apart,
and a group of plush-clad flunkies imported from England adorn the
entrance-hall, nothing could be better contrived to set one class against
another than domestic service.

Proverbs have grown out of it in every language. "No man is a hero to
his valet," and "familiarity breeds contempt," are clear enough. Our
comic papers are full of the misunderstandings and absurdities of the
situation, while one rarely sees a joke made about the other ways that
the poor earn their living. Think of it for a moment! To be obliged to
attend people at the times of day when they are least attractive, when
from fatigue or temper they drop the mask that society glues to their
faces so many hours in the twenty-four; to see always the seamy side of
life, the small expedients, the aids to nature; to stand behind a chair
and hear an acquaintance of your master's ridiculed, who has just been
warmly praised to his face; to see a hostess who has been graciously
urging her guests "not to go so soon," blurt out all her boredom and
thankfulness "that those tiresome So