service must forever be grudgingly given and grudgingly paid. There is
something in it, I do not quite know what, for I can never place myself
precisely in an American's place, that degrades the poor creatures who
serve, so that they must not only be social outcasts, but must leave such
a taint of dishonor on their work that one cannot even do it for one's
self without a sense of outraged dignity. You might account for this in
Europe, where ages of prescriptive wrong have distorted the relation out
of all human wholesomeness and Christian loveliness; but in America,
where many, and perhaps most, of those who keep servants and call them so
are but a single generation from fathers who earned their bread by the
sweat of their brows, and from mothers who nobly served in all household
offices, it is in the last degree bewildering. I can only account for it
by that bedevilment of the entire American ideal through the retention of
the English economy when the English polity was rejected. But at the
heart of America there is this ridiculous contradiction, and it must
remain there until the whole country is Altrurianized. There is no other
hope; but I did not now urge this point, and we turned to talk of other
things, related to the matters we had been discussing.

"The men," said Mrs. Makely, "get out of the whole bother very nicely, as
long as they are single, and even when they're married they are apt to
run off to the club when there's a prolonged upheaval in the kitchen."

"_I_ don't, Dolly," suggested her husband.

"No, _you_ don't, Dick," she returned, fondly. "But there are not
many like you."

He went on, with a wink at me, "I never live at the club, except in
summer, when you go away to the mountains."