work? What would they do without it?"

"From what I see of your conditions I should be afraid that they would
starve," I said.

"Yes, they can't all get places in shops or restaurants, and they have to
do something, or starve, as you say," she said; and she seemed to think
what I had said was a concession to her position.

"But if it were your own case?" I suggested. "If you had no alternatives
but starvation and domestic service, you would think there was harm in
it, even although you were glad to take a servant's place?"

I saw her flush, and she answered, haughtily, "You must excuse me if I
refuse to imagine myself taking a servant's place, even for the sake of
argument."

"And you are quite right," I said. "Your American instinct is too strong
to brook even in imagination the indignities which seem daily, hourly,
and momently inflicted upon servants in your system."

To my great astonishment she seemed delighted by this conclusion. "Yes,"
she said, and she smiled radiantly, "and now you understand how it is
that American girls won't go out to service, though the pay is so much
better and they are so much better housed and fed--and everything.
Besides," she added, with an irrelevance which always amuses her husband,
though I should be alarmed by it for her sanity if I did not find it so
characteristic of women here, who seem to be mentally characterized by
the illogicality of the civilization, "they're not half so good as the
foreign servants. They've been brought up in homes of their own, and