ceased to enter into practical ethics because our average neighbour
doesn't possess either, so we hear it is to be with his servant and
his maid.

They have had their day. There are no domestic servants at the
registries; the cap and apron, than which no uniform ever more
enhanced a fair maid or extenuated a plain one, will be found only in
the war museum, as relics of ante-bellum practice; we shall sluice our
own doorsteps in the early morning hours, receive our own letters from
the postman, have our own conversations with the butcher's young man
at the area gate; and in time, perhaps, learn how it may be possible
to eat a dinner which we have ourselves cooked and served up. Better
for us, all that, it may well be; but will it be better for our girls?
I am sure it will not.

Domestic service, I have said, is an employment which literature has
always approved. From Gay to Hazlitt, from Swift to Dickens, there
have been few writers of light touch upon life who have not had a kind
eye for the housemaid. There's a passage somewhere in Stevenson for
which I have spent an hour's vain hunting, which exactly hits the
centre. The confidential relationship, the trim appearance, not
without its suggestion of comic opera and the soubrette of the
_Comédie Française_, the combined air of cheerfulness and respect
which is demanded, mind you, on either side the bargain--all this is
acutely and vivaciously observed in half a page by a writer who never
missed a romantic opening in his days. The profession, indeed, has
never lacked romance in real life. Strangeness has persistently
followed beauty in and out of the kitchen. The number of old
gentlemen who have married their cooks is really considerable.
Younger gentlemen, whose god has been otherwhere, have married