ers, they sit between two chairs, the
class they serve has one code; the class they spring from has another,
equally good perhaps, certainly in some respects more delicate, but
different. In imitating the one code, unsuccessfully, they lose their
hold on the other. Their very speech--a mixture of dialect and standard
English with false intonations--betrays them. They are like a man
living abroad, who has lost grip on his native customs, and has
acquired ill the customs of his adopted country. It is not their fault.
Circumstances sin against them.

Mrs Widger tells me that, when she left her mother's for service, she
felt nothing so keenly as the loneliness, the isolation, of being in a
house where no one could be in any full sense of the word her
confidant, where she was at the beck and call of strangers from the
time she got up till the time she went to bed, where her irregular
hours of leisure were passed quite alone in a kitchen. It seems, as
might be anticipated, that _mental_ comfort or discomfort is at the
bottom of the servant question, and that class differences, class
misunderstandings, are ultimately the cause of it. Often enough the
mistress wishes to be kind, but she fails to understand that what she
values most differs from what is most valued by her servants. Often
enough the servants wish to do their best, but little irritations,
unsalved by sympathy and not to be discussed on terms of equality, lead
to sulky, don't-care moods which exasperate the mistress into positive,
instead of negative, unkindness. So a vicious circle is formed. The
covert enmity between one woman and another simply calls for give and
take where both are of the same class, but when one of them is, for
payment and all day, at the disposal of the other.... How many homes
there are where the menfolk can get anything done willingly, and the
mistress nothing whatever! The girls go out so early. They miss the
rough and tumble of their homes. They have their own little ambitions,
hardly comprehensible to anyone else. Whether or no they desire to be
satisfactory, they do want their own little flutters.

10

[Sidenote: _LITTLE SERVANT GIRLS_]

Poor brave small servant girls, earning your living while you are yet
but children! I see your faces at the doors, rosy from the country or
yellowish-white from anaemia and strong tea; see how your young breasts
hardly fill out your clinging bodices, all askew, and how your hips are
not yet grown