Of late years some recovery is discernible. Field-work, which fostered a
blowsy carelessness, has declined, and at the same time the arrival of
"residents" has greatly increased the demand for charwomen and
washerwomen. The women, therefore, find it worth while to cultivate a
certain tidiness in their persons, which extends to their homes. It is
true I am told that their ideas of good housework are often rudimentary
in the extreme; that the charwoman does not know when to change her
scrubbing water; that the washerwoman is easily satisfied with quite
dubious results; and I can well believe it. The state of the cottages is
betrayed naively by the young girls who go from them into domestic
service. "You don't seem to like things sticky," one of these girls
observed to a mistress distressed by sticky door-handles one day and
sticky table-knives the next day. That remark which Richard Jefferies
heard a mother address to her daughter, "Gawd help the poor missus as
gets hold o' _you_!" might very well be applied to many and many a
child of fourteen in this valley, going out, all untrained, to her first
"place"; but these things, indicating what has been and is, do not
affect the truth that a slight recovery has occurred. It is an open
question how much of the recovery is a revival of old ideas, called into
play again by new forms of employment. Perhaps more of it is due to
experience which the younger women now bring into the valley when they
marry, after being in comfortable domestic service outside the valley.
In other words, perhaps middle-class ideas of decent house-work are at
last coming in, to fill the place left empty by the obsolete peasant
ideas.

May we, then, conclude that the women are now in a fair way to do well;
that nothing has been lost which those middle-class ideas cannot make
good? In my view the circumstances warrant no such conclusion. Consider
what it is that has to be made good. It is something in the nature of a
civilization. It is the larger existence which enwrapped the peasant
woman's house-drudgery and made it worth while. A good domestic method
is all very well, and the middle-class method is probably better than
the old method; but alike in the peasant cottages, and now in
middle-class homes, we may see in domestic work a nucleus only--the core
of a fruit, the necessary framework of a more acceptable life. With the
cottage women in the old days that work favoured such developments of
abili