quality of work, but, inasmuch as the appliances are not made to
perform the fullest work, there is an amount of capital invested
disproportionate to the product when measured by the achievement in
other branches of industry. More important than this is the result of
the isolation upon the worker herself. There is nothing more devastating
to the inventive faculty, nor fatal to a flow of mind and spirit, than
the constant feeling of loneliness and the absence of that fellowship
which makes our public opinion. If an angry foreman reprimands a girl
for breaking a machine, twenty other girls hear him, and the culprit
knows perfectly well their opinion as to the justice or injustice of her
situation. In either case she bears it better for knowing that, and not
thinking it over in solitude. If a household employee breaks a utensil
or a piece of porcelain and is reprimanded by her employer, too often
the invisible jury is the family of the latter, who naturally uphold her
censorious position and intensify the feeling of loneliness in the
employee.

The household employee, in addition to her industrial isolation, is also
isolated socially. It is well to remember that the household employees
for the better quarters of the city and suburbs are largely drawn from
the poorer quarters, which are nothing if not gregarious. The girl is
born and reared in a tenement house full of children. She goes to school
with them, and there she learns to march, to read, and write in
companionship with forty others. When she is old enough to go to
parties, those she attends are usually held in a public hall and are
crowded with dancers. If she works in a factory, she walks home with
many other girls, in much the same spirit as she formerly walked to
school with them. She mingles with the young men she knows, in frank,
economic, and social equality. Until she marries she remains at home
with no special break or change in her family and social life. If she is