I wish that some word of mine with regard to this matter could sink into the mind of the mistress. I fear that it will never be possible to train the maid not to talk of her mistress to her friends. But the employer should be above discussing her servants with outsiders. This is one of the most glaring faults of conversation,—one of the most flagrant breaches of conversational etiquette among women of refinement. The hackneyed warning that the three _D’s_ to be banished from polite conversation are Dress, Disease and Domestics, has not been heeded by the average housewife, so far as the last _D_ is concerned. She will fill willing and unwilling ears with the account of her servants’ impertinences, of their faults, of how they are leaving without giving warning, and of how ungrateful all servants are, until one would think that her own soul was not above that of the laundress, chambermaid and cook, whose failings she dissects in public. Such talk reminds one of the conversation with which Bridget regales an admiring and indignant coterie. With the uneducated hireling, it may be pardonable; in the case of the educated employer it is inexcusable.
The best-trained servants say “Yes, madam,” instead of “Yes, ma’am.” In England women as well as men servants are addressed by their surnames. The custom does not commend itself to our American ideas.
Women who keep only one maid should, if possible, have the laundry work done out of the house. Only so can one be sure of a trim-looking servant to answer the door. And the appearance of the person who admits us to a house is taken, very justly, as a criterion of the domestic standards of the house. A popular novelist once divided the houses in a certain city into three classes: those that had maids, those that had maids without caps, and those who had maids with caps. A woman’s social standing need not depend on her having a maid at all,—she may “quite come to her own door,” as one snobbish woman puts it, but if she keep a maid, the maid should be properly dressed, and the cap is as essential a part of her dress as her apron.
THE thought of being without a maid strikes dismay to the heart of many a woman who can not be accused of laziness. She thinks of the manual toil connected with housekeeping as composed of a round of degrading tasks, and she can not imagine herself as performing these with dignity and attractiveness. The ugliness connected with doing Bridget’s work is what repels, and it must be confessed, at the start, that dust and dish-water are not agreeable things to contemplate, though hemmed squares of clean cheese-cloth for the one and plenty of good soap in the other tend to reduce disagreeable qualities to a minimum. One half, at least, of the prejudice many women, not financially prosperous, feel against “doing their own work,” as the phrase curiously goes, is the aversion to doing unbeautiful things. The other half rises from the sense of dismay in attempting that in which one has had no practise, for which one has had no previous preparation. The tasks connected with housekeeping are many and various; and if one is called to face them without experience or a system, the result is apt to be pandemonium until the mistress-maid is broken in. It is a pity, however, to approach the work with the idea that it is necessarily distasteful and disagreeable. Most women have some natural aptitude for domestic service. When properly trained they like it, or, at least, parts of it. What they lack often is not aptitude but practise; and, instead of expecting to gain skill through practise, as they would in other departments of work, they expect it to come by inspiration. Housekeeping is a science and an art. More even than this, it is a business, and needs, exactly as the business of a man does, time and patience for its conquest.