It is unseemly that a man should let any ancestors of his arise from
their graves to wait on his guests at table. The Chinese are a polite
race, and those of them who have visited England, and gone to dine in
great English houses, will not have made this remark aloud to their
hosts. I believe it is only their own ancestors that they worship, so
that they will not have felt themselves guilty of impiety in not rising
from the table and rushing out into the night. Nevertheless, they must
have been shocked.
The French Revolution, judged according to the hope it was made in,
must be pronounced a failure: it effected no fundamental change in human
nature. But it was by no means wholly ineffectual. For example, ladies
and gentlemen ceased to powder their hair, because of it; and gentlemen
adopted simpler costumes. This was so in England as well as in France.
But in England ladies and gentlemen were not so nimble-witted as to be
able to conceive the possibility of a world without powder. Powder had
been sent down from heaven, and must not vanish from the face of the
earth. Said Sir John to his Lady, ‘’Tis a matter easy to settle.
Your maid Deborah and the rest of the wenches shall powder their hair
henceforth.’ Whereat his Lady exclaimed in wrath, ‘Lud, Sir John! Have
you taken leave of your senses? A parcel of Abigails flaunting about the
house in powder--oh, preposterous!’ Whereat Sir John exclaimed ‘Zounds!’
and hotly demonstrated that since his wife had given up powder there
could be no harm in its assumption by her maids. Whereat his Lady
screamed and had the vapours and asked how he would like to see his
own footmen flaunting about the house in powder. Whereat he (always a
reasonable man, despite his hasty temper) went out and told his footmen
to wear powder henceforth. And in this they obeyed him. And there arose
a Lord of the Treasury, saying, ‘Let powder be taxed.’ And it was so,
and the tax was paid, and powder was still worn. And there came the
great Reform Bill, and the Steam Engine, and all manner of queer things,
but powder did not end, for custom hath many lives. Nor was there an end
of those things which the Nobility and Gentry had long since shed from
their own persons--as, laced coats and velvet breeches and silk hose;
forasmuch as without these powder could not aptly be. And it came
to pass that there was a great War. And there was also a Russian
Revolution, greater than the French one. And it may be that everything
will be changed, fundamentally and soon. Or it may be merely that Sir
John will say to his Lady, ‘My dear, I have decided that the footmen
shall not wear powder, and not wear livery, any more,’ and that his Lady
will say ‘Oh, all right.’ Then at length will the Eighteenth Century
vanish altogether from the face of the earth.
Some of the shallower historians would have us believe that powder
is deleterious to the race of footmen. They point out how plenteously
footmen abounded before 1790, and how steadily their numbers have
declined ever since. I do not dispute the statistics. One knows from the
Table Talk of Samuel Rogers that Mr. Horne Tooke, dining tête-á-tête
with the first Lord Lansdowne, had counted so many as thirty footmen in
attendance on the meal. That was a high figure--higher than in Rogers’
day, and higher far, I doubt not, than in ours. What I refuse to
believe is that the wearing of powder has caused among footmen an
ever-increasing mortality. Powder was forced on them by their employers
because of the French Revolution, but their subsequent fewness is
traceable rather to certain ideas forced by that Revolution on their
employers. The Nobility had begun to feel that it had better be just
a little less noble than heretofore. When the news of the fall of the
Bastille was brought to him, the first Lord Lansdowne (I conceive)
remained for many hours in his study, lost in thought, and at length,
rising from his chair, went out into the hall and discharged two
footmen. This action may have shortened his life, but I believe it to be
a fact that when he lay dying, some fifteen years later, he said to his
heir, ‘Discharge two more.’ Such enlightenment and adaptability were
not to be wondered at in so eminent a Whig. As time went on, even in the
great Tory houses the number of retainers was gradually cut down. Came
the Industrial Age, hailed by all publicists as the Millennium. Looms
were now tended, and blast-furnaces stoked, by middle-aged men who
in their youth had done nothing but hand salvers, and by young men who
might have been doing just that if the Bastille had been less brittle.
Noblemen, becoming less and less sure of themselves under the impact
of successive Reform Bills, wished to be waited on by less and less
numerous gatherings of footmen. And at length, in the course of the
great War, any Nobleman not young enough to be away fighting was waited
on by an old butler and a parlourmaid or two; and the ceiling did not
fall.
Even if the War shall have taught us nothing else, this it will have
taught us almost from its very outset: to mistrust all prophets, whether
of good or of evil. Pray stone me if I predict anything at all. It may
be that the War, and that remarkable by-product, the Russian Revolution,
will have so worked on the minds of Noblemen that they will prefer to
have not one footman in their service. Or it may be that all those men
who might be footmen will prefer to earn their livelihood in other ways
of life. It may even be that no more parlourmaids and housemaids, even
for very illustrious houses, will be forthcoming. I do not profess to
foresee. Perhaps things will go on just as before. But remember: things
were going on, even then. Suppose that in the social organism generally,
and in the attitude of servants particularly, the decades after the War
shall bring but a gradual evolution of what was previously afoot. Even
on this mild supposition must it seem likely that some of us will live
to look back on domestic service, or at least on what we now mean by
that term, as a curiosity of past days.
You have to look rather far behind you for the time when ‘the servant
question,’ as it is called, had not yet begun to arise. To find servants
collectively ‘knowing their place,’ as the phrase (not is, but) was, you
have to look right back to the dawn of Queen Victoria’s reign. I am not
sure whether even then those Georgian notice-boards still stood in the
London parks to announce that ‘Ladies and Gentlemen are requested, and
Servants are commanded’ not to do this and that. But the spirit of those
boards did still brood over the land: servants received commands, not
requests, and were not ‘obliging’ but obedient. As for the tasks set
them, I daresay the footmen in the great houses had an easy time: they
were there for ornament; but the (comparatively few) maids there, and
the maid or two in every home of the rapidly-increasing middle class,
were very much for use, having to do an immense amount of work for a
wage which would nowadays seem nominal. And they did it gladly, with no
notion that they were giving much for little, or that the likes of them
had any natural right to a glimpse of liberty or to a moment’s more
leisure than was needed to preserve their health for the benefit
of their employers, or that they were not in duty bound to be
truly thankful for having a roof over their devoted heads. Rare and
reprehensible was the maid who, having found one roof, hankered after
another. Improvident, too; for only by long and exclusive service could
she hope that in her old age she would not be cast out on the parish.
She might marry meanwhile? The chances were very much against that.
That was an idea misbeseeming her station in life. By the rules of all
households, ‘followers’ were fended ruthlessly away. Her state was sheer
slavery? Well, she was not technically a chattel. The Law allowed her to
escape at any time, after giving a month’s notice; and she did not work
for no wages at all, remember. This was hard on her owners? Well,
in ancient Rome and elsewhere, her employers would have had to pay a
large-ish sum of money for her, down, to a merchant. Economically, her
employers had no genuine grievance. Her parents had handed her over to
them, at a tender age, for nothing. There she was; and if she was a good
girl and gave satisfaction, and if she had no gipsy strain, to make her
restless for the unknown, there she ended her days, not without honour
from the second or third generation of her owners. As in Ancient Rome
and elsewhere, the system was, in the long run, conducive to much good
feeling on either side. ‘Poor Anne remained very servile in soul all
her days; and was altogether occupied, from the age of fifteen to
seventy-two, in doing other people’s wills, not her own.’ Thus wrote
Ruskin, in Praeterita, of one who had been his nurse, and his father’s.
Perhaps the passage is somewhat marred by its first word. But Ruskin had
queer views on many subjects. Besides, he was very old when, in 1885,
he wrote Praeterita. Long before that date, moreover, others than he had
begun to have queer views. The halcyon days were over.
Even in the ‘sixties there were many dark and cumulose clouds. It
was believed, however, that these would pass. ‘Punch,’ our ever-quick
interpreter, made light of them. Absurd that Jemima Jane should imitate
the bonnets of her mistress and secretly aspire to play the piano!
‘Punch’ and his artists, as you will find in his old volumes, were very
merry about her, and no doubt his readers believed that his exquisite
ridicule would kill, or his sound good sense cure, the malady in her
soul. Poor misguided girl!--why was she flying in the face of Nature?
Nature had decreed that some should command, others obey; that some
should sit imperative all day in airy parlours, and others be executive
in basements. I daresay that among the sitters aloft there were many
whose indignation had a softer side to it. Under the Christian Emperors,
Roman ladies were really very sorry for their slaves. It is unlikely
that no English ladies were so in the ‘sixties. Pity, after all, is
in itself a luxury. It is for the ‘some’ a measure of the gulf between
themselves and the ‘others.’ Those others had now begun to show signs of
restiveness; but the gulf was as wide as ever.
Anthony Trollope was not, like ‘Punch,’ a mere interpreter of what was
upmost in the average English mind: he was a beautifully patient and
subtle demonstrator of all that was therein. Reading him, I soon forget
that I am reading about fictitious characters and careers; quite soon
do I feel that I am collating intimate memoirs and diaries. For sheer
conviction of truth, give me Trollope. You, too, if you know him, must
often have uttered this appeal. Very well. Have you been given ‘Orley
Farm’? And do you remember how Lady Mason felt after confessing to Sir
Peregrine Orme that she had forged the will? ‘As she slowly made her way
across the hall, she felt that all of evil, all of punishment, had now
fallen upon her. There are periods in the lives of some of us--I trust
but of few--when with the silent inner voice of suffering’--and here,
in justice to Trollope, I must interrupt him by saying that he seldom
writes like this; and I must also, for a reason which will soon be
plain, ask you not to skip a word--‘we call on the mountains to fall
and crush us, and on the earth to gape open and take us in--when with
an agony of intensity, we wish our mothers had been barren. In these
moments the poorest and most desolate are objects to us of envy, for
their sufferings can be as nothing to our own. Lady Mason, as she crept
silently across the hall, saw a servant girl pass down towards the
entrance to the kitchen, and would have given all, all that she had in
the world, to change places with that girl. But no change was possible
to her. Neither would the mountains crush her, nor the earth take her
in. This was her burden, and she must,’ etc., etc.
You enjoyed the wondrous bathos? Of course. And yet there wasn’t any
bathos at all, really. At least, there wasn’t any in 1862, when ‘Orley
Farm’ was published. Servants really were ‘most desolate’ in those days,
and ‘their sufferings’ were less acute only than those of gentlewomen
who had forged wills. This is an exaggerated view? Well it was the view
held by gentlewomen at large, in the ‘sixties. Trust Trollope.
Why to a modern gentlewoman would it seem so much more dreadful to be
crushed by mountains and swallowed by earthquakes than to be a servant
girl passing down towards the entrance to the kitchen? In other words,
how is it that servants have so much less unpleasant a time than they
were having half-a-century ago? I should like to think this melioration
came through our sense of justice, but I cannot claim that it did.
Somehow, our sense of justice never turns in its sleep till long after
the sense of injustice in others has been thoroughly aroused; nor is
it ever up and doing till those others have begun to make themselves
thoroughly disagreeable, and not even then will it be up and doing more
than is urgently required of it by our convenience at the moment. For
the improvement in their lot, servants must, I am afraid, be allowed to
thank themselves rather than their employers. I am not going to trace
the stages of that improvement. I will not try to decide in what year
servants passed from wistfulness to resentment, or from resentment to
exaction. This is not a sociological treatise, it is just an essay; and
I claim an essayist’s privilege of not groping through the library of
the British Museum on the chance of mastering all the details. I confess
that I did go there yesterday, thinking I should find in Mr. and Mrs.
Sidney Webb’s ‘History of Trade Unionism’ the means of appearing to know
much. But I drew blank. It would seem that servants have no trade
union. This is strange. One would not have thought so much could be done
without organisation. The mere Spirit of the Time, sneaking down
the steps of areas, has worked wonders. There has been no servants’
campaign, no strategy, nothing but an infinite series of spontaneous
and sporadic little risings in isolated households. Wonders have been
worked, yes. But servants are not yet satiated with triumph. More and
more, on the contrary, do they glide--long before the War they had begun
gliding--away into other forms of employment. Not merely are the changed
conditions of domestic service not changed enough for them: they seem to
despise the thing itself. It was all very well so long as they had not
been taught to read and write, but--There, no doubt, is the root of the
mischief. Had the governing classes not forced those accomplishments
on them in 1872--But there is no use in repining. What’s done can’t
be undone. On the other hand, what must be done can’t be left undone.
Housework, for example. What concessions by the governing classes, what
bribes, will be big enough hereafter to get that done?
Perhaps the governing classes will do it for themselves, eventually,
and their ceilings not fall. Or perhaps there will be no more governing
classes--merely the State and its swarms of neat little overseers, male
and female. I know not whether in this case the sum of human happiness
will be greater, but it will certainly--it and the sum of human
dullness--be more evenly distributed. I take it that under any scheme of
industrial compulsion for the young a certain number of the conscripts
would be told off for domestic service. To every family in every flat
(houses not legal) would be assigned one female member of the community.
She would be twenty years old, having just finished her course of
general education at a municipal college. Three years would be her term
of industrial (sub-sect. domestic) service. Her diet, her costume, her
hours of work and leisure, would be standardised, but the lenses of
her pince-nez would be in strict accordance to her own eyesight. If
her employers found her faulty in work or conduct, and proved to
the visiting inspector that she was so, she would be penalised by an
additional term of service. If she, on the other hand, made good any
complaint against her employers, she would be transferred to another
flat, and they be penalised by suspension of their license to employ.
There would always be chances of friction. But these chances would not
be so numerous nor so great as they are under that lack of system which
survives to-day.
Servants would be persons knowing that for a certain period certain
tasks were imposed on them, tasks tantamount to those in which all
their coevals were simultaneously engaged. To-day they are persons not
knowing, as who should say, where they are, and wishing all the while
they were elsewhere--and mostly, as I have said, going elsewhere. Those
who remain grow more and more touchy, knowing themselves a mock to the
rest; and their qualms, even more uncomfortably than their demands and
defects, are always haunting their employers. It seems almost incredible
that there was a time when Mrs. Smith said ‘Sarah, your master wishes--’
or Mr. Smith said ‘Sarah, go up and ask your mistress whether--’ I am
well aware that the very title of this essay jars. I wish I could find
another; but in writing one must be more explicit than one need be by
word of mouth. I am well aware that the survival of domestic service, in
its old form, depends more and more on our agreement not to mention it.
Assuredly, a most uncomfortable state of things. Is it, after all, worth
saving?--a form so depleted of right human substance, an anomaly so
ticklish. Consider, in your friend’s house, the cheerful smile of yonder
parlourmaid; hark to the housemaid’s light brisk tread in the corridor;
note well the slight droop of the footman’s shoulders as he noiselessly
draws near. Such things, as being traditional, may pander to your sense
of the great past. Histrionically, too, they are good. But do you really
like them? Do they not make your blood run a trifle cold? In the thick
of the great past, you would have liked them well enough, no doubt.
I myself am old enough to have known two or three servants of the
old school--later editions of Ruskin’s Anne. With them there was no
discomfort, for they had no misgiving. They had never wished (heaven
help them!) for more, and in the process of the long years had acquired,
for inspiration of others, much--a fine mellowness, the peculiar sort of
dignity, even of wisdom, that comes only of staying always in the same
place, among the same people, doing the same things perpetually. Theirs
was the sap that rises only from deep roots, and where they were you had
always the sense of standing under great wide branches. One especially
would I recall, who--no, personally I admire the plungingly intimate
kind of essayist very much indeed, but I never was of that kind, and
it’s too late to begin now. For a type of old-world servant I would
recall rather some more public worthy, such as that stout old hostler
whom, whenever you went up to stay in Hampstead, you would see standing
planted outside that stout old hostelry, Jack Straw’s Castle. He stands
there no more, and the hostelry can never again be to me all that it was
of solid comfort. Or perhaps, as he was so entirely an outside figure,
I might rather say that Hampstead itself is not what it was. His robust
but restful form, topped with that weather-beaten and chin-bearded face,
was the hub of the summit of Hampstead. He was as richly local as the
pond there--that famous pond which in hot weather is so much waded
through by cart-horses and is at all seasons so much barked around by
excitable dogs and cruised on by toy boats. He was as essential as it
and the flag-staff and the gorse and the view over the valley away to
Highgate. It was always to Highgate that his big blue eyes were looking,
and on Highgate that he seemed to be ruminating. Not that I think he
wanted to go there. He was Hampstead-born and Hampstead-bred, and very
loyal to that village. In the course of his life he had ‘bin down to
London a matter o’ three or four times,’ he would tell me, ‘an’ slep’
there once.’ He knew me to be a native of that city, and, for he was the
most respectful of men, did not make any adverse criticism of it. But
clearly it had not prepossessed him. Men and--horses rather than cities
were what he knew. And his memory was more retentive of horses than of
men. But he did--and this was a great thrill for me--did, after some
pondering at my behest, remember to have seen in Heath Street, when he
was a boy, ‘a gen’leman with summut long hair, settin’ in a small cart,
takin’ a pictur’.’ To me Ford Madox Brown’s ‘Work’ is of all modern
pictur’s the most delightful in composition and strongest in conception,
the most alive and the most worth-while; and I take great pride in
having known some one who saw it in the making. But my friend himself
set little store on anything that had befallen him in days before he
was ‘took on as stable-lad at the Castle.’ His pride was in the Castle,
wholly.
Part of his charm, like Hampstead’s, was in the surprise one had at
finding anything like it so near to London. Even now, if you go to
districts near which no great towns are, you will find here and there an
inn that has a devoted waiter, a house with a fond butler. As to butlers
elsewhere, butlers in general, there is one thing about them that I do
not at all understand. It seems to be against nature, yet it is a
fact, that in the past forty years they have been growing younger; and
slimmer. In my childhood they were old, without exception; and stout.
At the close of the last century they had gradually relapsed into middle
age, losing weight all the time. And in the years that followed they
were passing back behind the prime of life, becoming willowy juveniles.
In 1915, it is true, the work of past decades was undone butlers: were
suddenly as old and stout as ever they were, and so they still are.
But this, I take it, is only a temporary setback. At the restoration of
peace butlers will reappear among us as they were in 1915, and anon will
be losing height and weight too, till they shall have become bright-eyed
children, with pattering feet. Or will their childhood be of a less
gracious kind than that? I fear so. I have seen, from time to time,
butlers who had shed all semblance of grace, butlers whose whole
demeanour was a manifesto of contempt for their calling and of devotion
to the Spirit of the Age. I have seen a butler in a well-established
household strolling around the diners without the slightest droop, and
pouring out wine in an off-hand and quite obviously hostile manner. I
have seen him, towards the end of the meal, yawning. I remember another
whom, positively, I heard humming--a faint sound indeed, but menacing as
the roll of tumbrils.
These were exceptional cases, I grant. For the most part, the butlers
observed by me have had a manner as correctly smooth and colourless as
their very shirt-fronts. Aye, and in two or three of them, modern though
they were in date and aspect, I could have sworn there was ‘a flame of
old-world fealty all bright.’ Were these but the finer comedians?
There was one (I will call him Brett) who had an almost dog-like way
of watching his master. Was this but a calculated touch in a merely
aesthetic whole? Brett was tall and slender, and his movements were
those of a greyhound under perfect self-control. Baldness at the temples
enhanced the solemnity of his thin smooth face. It is more than twenty
years since first I saw him; and for a long period I saw him often, both
in town and in country. Against the background of either house he was
impeccable. Many butlers might be that. Brett’s supremacy was in the
sense he gave one that he was, after all, human--that he had a heart, in
which he had taken the liberty to reserve a corner for any true
friend of his master and mistress. I remember well the first time he
overstepped sheer formality in relation to myself. It was one morning in
the country, when my entertainers and my fellow guests had gone out in
pursuit of some sport at which I was no good. I was in the smoking room,
reading a book. Suddenly--no, Brett never appeared anywhere suddenly.
Brett appeared, paused at precisely the right speaking distance, and
said in a low voice, ‘I thought it might interest you to know, sir, that
there’s a white-tailed magpie out on the lawn. Very rare, as you know,
sir. If you look out of the window you will see the little fellow
hopping about on the lawn.’ I thanked him effusively as I darted to
the window, and simulated an intense interest in ‘the little fellow.’ I
greatly overdid my part. Exit Brett, having done his to perfection.
What worries me is not that I showed so little self-command and so much
insincerity, but the doubt whether Brett’s flawless technique was the
vehicle for an act of true good feeling or was used simply for the
pleasure of using it. Similar doubts abide in all my special memories
of him. There was an evening when he seemed to lose control over
himself--but did he really lose it? There were only four people
at dinner: my host, his wife, their nephew (a young man famous for
drollery), and myself. Towards the end of dinner the conversation had
turned on early marriages. ‘I,’ said the young man presently, ‘shall
not marry till I am seventy. I shall then marry some charming girl of
seventeen.’ His aunt threw up her hands, exclaiming, ‘Oh, Tom, what a
perfectly horrible idea! Why, she isn’t born yet!’ ‘No,’ said the young
man, ‘but I have my eye on her mother.’ At this, Brett, who was holding
a light for his master’s cigarette, turned away convulsively, with
a sudden dip of the head, and vanished from the room. His breakdown
touched and pleased all four beholders. But--was it a genuine lapse? Or
merely a feint to thrill us?--the feint of an equilibrist so secure that
he can pretend to lose his balance?
If I knew why Brett ceased to be butler in that household, I might be
in less doubt as to the true inwardness of him. I knew only that he was
gone. That was fully ten years ago. Since then I have had one glimpse of
him. This was on a summer night in London. I had gone out late to visit
some relatives and assure myself that they were safe and sound; for
Zeppelins had just passed over London for the first time. Not so much
horror as a very deep disgust was the atmosphere in the populous quiet
streets and squares. One square was less quiet than others, because
somebody was steadily whistling for a taxi. Anon I saw the whistler
silhouetted in the light cast out on a wide doorstep from an open door,
and I saw that he was Brett. His attitude, as he bent out into the dark
night, was perfect in grace, but eloquent of a great tensity--even of
agony. Behind him stood a lady in an elaborate evening cloak. Brett’s
back must have conveyed to her in every curve his surprise, his shame,
that she should be kept waiting. His chivalry in her behalf was such as
Burke’s for Marie Antoinette--little had he dreamed that he should have
lived to see such disasters fallen upon her in a nation of gallant
men, in a nation of men of honour, and of cavaliers. He had thought ten
thousand taxis must have leaped from their stands, etc. The whistle
that at first sounded merely mechanical and ear-piercing had become
heartrending and human when I saw from whom it proceeded--a very
heart-cry that still haunts me. But was it a heart-cry? Was Brett, is
Brett more than a mere virtuoso?
He is in any case what employers call a treasure, and to any one who
wishes to go forth and hunt for him I will supply a chart showing the
way to that doorstep on which last I saw him. But I myself, were I ever
so able to pay his wages, should never covet him--no, nor anything like
him. Perhaps we are not afraid of menservants if we look out at them
from the cradle. None was visible from mine. Only in later years and
under external auspices did I come across any of them. And I am
as afraid of them as ever. Maidservants frighten me less, but they
also--except the two or three ancients aforesaid--have always struck
some degree of terror to my soul. The whole notion of domestic
service has never not seemed to me unnatural. I take no credit for
enlightenment. Not to have the instinct to command implies a lack of
the instinct to obey. The two aptitudes are but different facets of one
jewel: the sense of order. When I became a schoolboy, I greatly disliked
being a monitor’s fag. Other fags there were who took pride in the
quality of the toast they made for the breakfasts and suppers of their
superiors. My own feeling was that I would rather eat it myself, and
that if I mightn’t eat it myself I would rather it were not very good.
Similarly, when I grew to have fags of my own, and by morning and by
evening one of them solemnly entered to me bearing a plate on which
those three traditional pieces of toast were solemnly propped one
against another, I cared not at all whether the toast were good or bad,
having no relish for it at best, but could have eaten with gusto toast
made by my own hand, not at all understanding why that member should be
accounted too august for such employment. Even so in my later life. Loth
to obey, loth to command. Convention (for she too frightens me) has made
me accept what servants would do for me by rote. But I would liefer have
it ill-done than ask even the least mettlesome of them to do it better,
and far liefer, if they would only be off and not do it at all, do it
for myself. In Italy--dear Italy, where I have lived much--servants do
still regard service somewhat in the old way, as a sort of privilege;
so that with Italian servants I am comparatively at my ease. But oh, the
delight when on the afternoon of some local festa there is no servant
at all in the little house! Oh, the reaction, the impulse to sing and
dance, and the positive quick obedience to that impulse! Convention
alone has forced me to be anywhere a master. Ariel and Caliban, had I
been Prospero on that island, would have had nothing to do and nothing
to complain of; and Man Friday on that other island would have bored me,
had I been Crusoe. When I was a king in Babylon and you were a Christian
slave, I promptly freed you.
Anarchistic? Yes; and I have no defence to offer, except the rather
lame one that I am a Tory Anarchist. I should like every one to go about
doing just as he pleased--short of altering any of the things to which I
have grown accustomed. Domestic service is not one of those things, and
I should be glad were there no more of it.