expected and was never visibly offered the familiar pleasantries which
are the portion of that strange, sad, English creation, the barmaid. In
tens of thousands of London public-houses she stands with her hand on
beer-pumps, and exchanges jocose banalities with persons beyond the
counter in whose dim regard she must show a mere blur of hardened
loveliness against her background of bottles and decanters; but the
waitress at Crosby Place is of an ideal of behavior as fine as that of
any Phyllis in a White Mountain hotel; and I thought it to the honor of
the lunchers that they seemed all to know it. The gentle influence of
her presence had spread to a restaurant in the neighborhood where,
another day, in trying for Crosby Place, I was misled by the mediaeval
aspect of the entrance, and where I found waitresses again instead of
waiters. But nowhere else do I remember them, always excepting the
manifold tea-houses of the metropolis, and those repeated A. B. C.
cold-lunch places of the Aerated Bread Company, where a chill has
apparently been imparted to their bearing by the temperature of the food
they serve. It is very wholesome, however, and it may be rather that a
New England severity in them is the effect of the impersonal relation of
served and server which no gratuity humanizes.

It would not be easy to fathom the reason for the employment of girls as
ushers in the London theatres. Perhaps it is to heighten the glamour of
a place whose glamour hardly needs heightening, or more probably it is
to soften the asperity of the play-goer who finds himself asked sixpence
for that necessary evil, the programme. But, now I come to think of it,
most of the play-goers in London are Englishmen who have been always
used to paying, ancestrally and personally, sixpence for their
programmes and feel no asperity at being so plundered. The true
explanation may be found, after all, in the discovery, akin to the
government's, that their service is cheaper than men ushers' would be.