will not serve her. She will not, because she looks upon
service as ignominious; she has her own pride; she will not tell you
that she is in a shop, but that she is "in business"; if she is "in
service", often she will say nothing about it at all, for the other
girls, who work their eleven hours a day for a few shillings a week,
despise her. They at least have fixed hours and they do not "live in";
when they have done their work they are free. They may have had less to
eat that day than the comfortable parlor-maid, and maybe they have less
in their pockets, but they are free, and they do not hesitate to show
their contempt to the helot. I think that new pride has done as much as
anything to crush the old, large, unwieldy home, for its four stories
and its vast basement needed many steady, hardworking slaves, who only
spoke when they were spoken to and always obeyed. It is not that
mistresses were bad; some were and some were not, but from the modern
girl's point of view they were all bad because they had power at any
time of day or night to demand service, to impose tasks that were not
contracted for, to forbid the house to the servant's friends, to make
her loves difficult, to forbid her even to speak to a man. Whether the
mistress so behaved did not matter; she had the power, and in a society
growingly individual, growingly democratic, that was bound to become a
heavy yoke.

And so, very slowly, the modern evolution began. The first to go were
the immense houses of Kensington, Paddington, Bayswater,
Bloomsbury,--those old houses within hail of Hyde Park,--which once held
large families, all of them anxious to live not too far from the Court.
They fell because it was almost impossible to afford enough servants to
keep in order their three or four reception rooms, and their eight, ten,
twelve bedrooms; they fell because the birth rate shrank, and the large
families of the early nineteenth century became exceptional; they fell
also because the old rigidity, or rather the stateliness, of the home
was vanishing; because the lady of the house ventured to have tea in her
drawing-room when there were no callers, and little by little came to
leave newspapers about in it and to smoke in it. With the difficulties
of the old houses came a demand for something smaller, requiring less
labor. This accounts for the villas, of which some four hundred thousand
have been built in the suburbs of London, in the villages London has
absorb