to buy a hotel.
They think they will like to keep a hotel. They don't understand a bit
about the business, which we believe is a complicated one, but this does
not trouble them in the least.

They quarrel a good deal over their love-making, do the stage
servant-girl and her young man, and they always come into the
drawing-room to do it. They have got the kitchen, and there is the
garden (with a fountain and mountains in the background--you can see
it through the window), but no! no place in or about the house is good
enough for them to quarrel in except the drawing-room. They quarrel
there so vigorously that it even interferes with the dusting of the
chair-legs.

She ought not to be long in saving up sufficient to marry on, for
the generosity of people on the stage to the servants there makes one
seriously consider the advisability of ignoring the unremunerative
professions of ordinary life and starting a new and more promising
career as a stage servant.

No one ever dreams of tipping the stage servant with less than a
sovereign when they ask her if her mistress is at home or give her a
letter to post, and there is quite a rush at the end of the piece to
stuff five-pound notes into her hand. The good old man gives her ten.

The stage servant is very impudent to her mistress, and the master--he
falls in love with her and it does upset the house so.

Sometimes the servant-girl is good and faithful, and then she is Irish.
All good servant-girls on the stage are Irish.

All the male visitors are expected to kiss the stage servant-girl when
they come into the house, and to dig her in the ribs and to say: "Do you
know, Jane, I think you're an uncommonly nice girl--click." They always
say this, and she likes it.

Many years ago, when we were young, we thought we would see if things
were the same off the stage, and the next time we called at a certain
friend's house we tried this business on.

She wasn't quite so dazzlingly beautiful as they are on the stage, but
we passed that. She showed us up into the drawing-room, and then said
she would go and tell her mistress we were there.

We felt this was the time to begin. We skipped between her and the door.
We held our hat in front of us, cocked our head on one side, and said:
"Don't go! don't go!"

The girl seemed alarmed. We began to get a little nervous ourselves, but
we had begun it and we meant to go through with it.

We said, "Do you know, Jane" (her name wasn'