As if that were the same thing at all! Men's places are easily filled, and the average man is so anchored by domestic ties that he thinks several times before he gives warning, as indeed would a servant if she had a family depending on her earnings. But a servant usually has no ties. Her clothes are in her tin trunk, and her hopes in the registry office; thus, accompanied by the one and protected by the other, she goes on her winding way. If she had an idle or sick husband and half-a-dozen children to support, her attitude towards service would be less lofty.
Coming often from very poor homes, it is a curious fact that servants are always extravagant, at any rate with other people's belongings. Lady Macbeth, under whose dominion I languished for over three years, once confessed to me that she prided herself on her economy, which, she said, proved her to be of a different class from other servants.
Once, in a gracious moment, she also told me she preferred being a good cook rather than a poor nursery governess who, in the delicate and unwritten code of service, is on a higher social scale, hovering, I believe on the outskirts of the lady pinnacle. She was kind enough to add that she would rather cook for some one she could look up to than teach a lot of stupid young ones. I was highly flattered, and so was the other member of my family, and we tried hard to live up to her good opinion. But no man is a hero to his valet, and she never repeated the compliment.
It is unfortunately true that domestic troubles, like rheumatism, toothache, and sea-sickness, from which one can suffer untold agonies, never arouse a proper sympathy. A man takes his business seriously enough, but he never takes his wife's housekeeping seriously.
"What in the world do you do all day long?" is his kindly, scornful cry; as if there were nothing to do! Yet it is that which gives women grey hairs and nervous prostration, and forms an endless topic of conversation among those who would gladly avoid the subject. It requires cast-iron, steel-bound nerves to confront rebellion in the kitchen, simply because of the terror of going from bad to worse. That awful pilgrimage to the registry office, those hideous interviews, that terrible month of probation--your probation as well as hers. I defy two women to get together and not talk "servants" before the end of the conversation. Not even intellect will save you the flight to that inferno, the Registry Office.