“May I ask if you have ever hired a servant here before?” said Mrs. Challoner.
“I have not,” replied the stranger; “but my husband’s sister did. She came here daily for nearly a week, and when she got a suitable girl, she only stayed two months, because she heard of another place in a neighbourhood she liked better!”
“I wonder almost that you are making this experiment after that experience!” remarked Lucy.
“It does not seem very encouraging,” answered the other; “but what is one to do? And when we get them they don’t work, and don’t they waste and destroy! I wish we could do without servants altogether! I think I could get along finely—if it wasn’t for opening the street door. One cannot do that, you know.”
Lucy was silent, considering. It seemed to her, at that moment, that if Charlie was at home, and no duty of breadwinning lay upon herself, then rather than endure a prolongation and repetition of her present experience, she would spend the remainder of her life in opening her street door to all comers.
The lady accepted her silence as sympathy.
“My sister-in-law says the same,” she went on. “She and her husband have a flat—a pretty little flat near the Parks, where they are rather expensive, so they have one with only five rooms—and they’ve just got one little child. And Minnie says she could manage quite well, if it wasn’t for taking out the perambulator.”
“I always took out my boy myself,” said Lucy, with her arm about Hugh’s neck, “and I often opened the hall door—generally, indeed—because I could see who was coming from my window, and it saved my maid’s running up a flight of stairs.”
The stranger looked at her rather coldly.
“That is the way servants get spoiled,” she remarked. “And they don’t stay with you a bit longer for all your pains.”
“Mine stayed with me seven years, and has only gone away to get married,” said Lucy quietly.
“You had better mention that to the girls,” she answered. “I believe it recommends a place. But most of them will feel they have been deceived with false hopes unless the event comes off within seven months! Seven years! Well, you’ve got something to learn now. You have not cut your mistress-teeth yet.”
Lucy felt that her mind was opening to new lines of thought in the world about her. She had always known that Florence thought in these ways; but she had thought that was just Florence. Her own small circle of intimates were people of another sort, being all people who had done real work of some kind or another, and were proud of it, and would have felt hurt to be suspected of idleness. But here were women who were prepared to work (for a glance at the knitter’s hands revealed that truth about her), but who were so ashamed of work that they could do it only out of sight, and were under the mean necessity of hiring a mask to do whatever people must see! How odd it was! And then it flashed into Lucy’s mind that one can scarcely expect very worthy girls to rush eagerly to discharge tasks that other women are simply ashamed to do! If it be so disgraceful to open one’s own door, or to wheel out one’s own baby, why should other women not feel it still more disgraceful to open other people’s doors and wheel out other people’s babies? Why should they not be eager to rush from these discredited duties towards others not yet lying under the same ban?