"
A FREQUENT and naive complaint one hears, is of the
unsatisfactoriness of servants generally, and their ingratitude and
astonishing lack of affection for their masters, in particular.
"After all I have done for them," is pretty sure to sum up the long
tale of a housewife's griefs. Of all the delightful
inconsistencies that grace the female mind, this latter point of
view always strikes me as being the most complete. I artfully lead
my fair friend on to tell me all about her woes, and she is sure to
be exquisitely one-sided and quite unconscious of her position.
"They are so extravagant, take so little interest in my things, and
leave me at a moment's notice, if they get an idea I am going to
break up. Horrid things! I wish I could do without them! They
cause me endless worry and annoyance." My friend is very nearly
right, - but with whom lies the fault?
The conditions were bad enough years ago, when servants were kept
for decades in the same family, descending like heirlooms from
father to son, often (abroad) being the foster sisters or brothers
of their masters, and bound to the household by an hundred ties of
sympathy and tradition. But in our day, and in America, where
there is rarely even a common language or nationality to form a
bond, and where households are broken up with such facility, the
relation between master and servant is often so strained and so
unpleasant that we risk becoming (what foreigners reproach us with
being), a nation of hotel-dwellers.
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