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The Cha?npagne Sta7idard

Br THE SAME AUTHOR

KITWYK: A Story. With numerous Illus- trations by Howard Pyle, Albert Sterner, and G. W. Edwards. Crown 8vo. bs.

THE FORBIDDEN FRUIT ; or, The

Shaddock or The Grape Fruit. How to Serve and How to Eat It. By Mrs. John Lane. Fcap. 8vo. 6d.

Translated by Mrs. John Lane. PETERKINS: The Story of a Dog. Trans- lated from the German of OssiP Schubin by Mrs. John Lane. With numerous Illustrations by Cottington Taylor Small 4to. 3^. dd.

champXgne standard

M.~ John Lane

LO N D O N

'W&^X^ork .JOHN LAN E COMB^NY

\ ^ O 6

Copyright, 1906, By John Lane Company

William Clowes jc Sons, Limited, Printers, London

TO THE PUBLISHER MY GENIAL AND SUGGESTIVE CRITIC

My Preface

I WAS sitting alone with a lead-pencil, having a tete-a-tete with a sheet of paper. A brisk fire burned on the hearth, and through the beating of the rain against the little, curved Georgian windows I could hear the monotonous roll of the sea at the foot of the narrow street, and the tear and crunching of the pebbles down the shingle as the waves receded.

I had been ordered to write a preface to explain the liberty I had taken in making miscellaneous observations about two great nations, and then putting a climax to my effrontery by having them printed. So here I was trying, with the aid of a lead- pencil and a sheet of paper, to construct a preface, and that without the ghost of an idea how to begin. Nor was the dim electric light illuminating ; nor, in the narrow street, the nasal invocation of an

My Preface

aged man with a green shade over his eyes, arm in arm with an aged woman keenly aHve to pennies, somewhere out of whose interiors there emanated a song to the words, " dowry, glowry, hallaluh ! "

In fact, all the ideas that did occur to me were miles away from a preface. It was maddening ! I even demanded that the ocean should stop making such a horrid noise, if only for five minutes. And that set me idly to thinking what would happen to the world if the tides should really be struck motionless even for that short space of time. The idea is so out of my line that it is quite at the service of any distressed romancer, dashed with science, who, also, may be nibbling his pencil.

I sat steeped in that profound melancholy familiar to authors who are required to say something and who have nothing to say. Finally, in a despair which is familiar to such as have seen the first act of Faust, I invoked that Supernatural Power who comes with a red light and bestows inspiration.

" If you'll only help me to begin," I

Vlll

My Preface

cried, " I'll do the rest ! " For I realised in what active demand his services must be.

I didn't believe anything v^ould happen. Nothing ever does except in the first act of Faust ^ and I must really take this opportunity to beg Faust not to unbutton his old age so obviously. Still, that again has nothing to do with my preface !

I reclined on a red plush couch before the fire and thought gloomily of Faust's buttons, and how the supernatural never comes to one's aid these material days, when my eyes, following the elegant outlines of the couch, strayed to a red plush chair at its foot, strangely and supernaturally out of place. And how can I describe my amaze- ment and terror when I saw on that red plush chair a big black cat, with his tail neatly curled about his toes! A strange black cat where no cat had ever been seen before ! He stared at me, and I stared at him. Was he the Rapid Reply of that Supernatural Power I had so rashly invoked .'' At the mere thought I turned cold.

" Are you a message ' from the night's

IX

My Preface

Plutonian shore' ? " I said, trembling, " or do you belong to the landlady ? "

His reply was merely to blink, and indeed he was so black and the background was so black that but for his blink I shouldn't have known he was there.

" If," I murmured, " he recognises quota- tions from I' he Raven^ it will be a sign that he is going to stay forever.' Where- upon I declaimed all the shivery bits of that immortal poem, which I had received as a Christmas present.

He was so far from being agitated that before I had finished he had settled down in a cosy heap, with his fore-paws tucked under his black shirt front, and was fast asleep, delivering himself of the emotional purr of a tea kettle in full operation. For a moment I was appalled. Was this new and stodgy edition of I'he Raven going to stay forever ?

" ' Get thee back into the tempest and the night's Plutonian shore,' " I urged, but all he did was to open one lazy eye, and wink. For a moment I was frozen with horror.

Mjy Preface

Was I doomed to live forever in the society of a strange black cat, of possibly supernatural antecedents ?

" ' Take thy form from off my door,' " I was about to address him, but paused, for, strictly speaking, he was not on my door. And just as I was quite faint with apprehen- sion, common-sense, which does not usually come to the aid of ladies in distress, came to mine. Like a flash it came to me that even if he stayed forever, / needn't. I had only taken the lodgings by the week. He was foiled.

With a new sense of security I again studied him, and I observed a subtle change. He was evidently a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde kind of cat. I became conscious of a complex personality. Though to the careless observer he might appear to be only a chubby cat, full of purr, to me he was rapidly developing into something more ; in fact, mind was, as usual, triumphing over matter, and presto ! before I knew what he was about, he had changed into an idea.

" To call you only a cat ! " I cried in

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My Preface

fervent gratitude. " Only a cat, indeed ! You are much more than a cat — you are a miracle ! You are a preface ! " And so, indeed, he was.

Like one inspired I thought of his first illustrious ancestor, on four legs, the one who had once so heroically looked at a king, with the result that not only did he gain a perpetual permission for his race, but he has passed into an immortal proverb. That was not his only glorious deed, however, for it was he who first encouraged the Modest. If it had not been for that historic cat, what would have become of them ! When the Modest want to say something, no matter how modestly, and get frightfully snubbed, don't they always declare that " A cat may look at a king " ? Really, that illustrious cat has never had his due ! Besides heaps of other things, is he not the original type of the first true Republican ? I would like to know what the world would have done if he hadn't looked at the king ? Why, it was the first great Declaration of Independence.

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My Preface

Besides, don't we owe to him, though hitherto unacknowledged, those underlying principles of that other glorious Declaration of Independence, the happy result of which seems to be that tea is so awfully dear in America ?

No, one doesn't hold with a cat's laughing at a king. No cat should laugh at a king, for that leads to anarchy and impoliteness and things going off. It is the cat who looks civilly at kings who has come to stay, along with republics and free thought. But possibly that is the one little drawback — thought is so dreadfully free ! It used to be rather select to think, but now everybody thinks, and kings and other important things are not nearly as sacred as they used to be, and even the Modest get a chance. I suppose it is the spirit of the Age. *******

I had got so far and had to nibble again at my pencil for further inspiration, when the door opened and my landlady appeared. She is a worthy woman, and she holds her head on one side like an elderly canary-bird.

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My Preface

She spoke with a remnant of breath.

" If you please, ma'am, we have lost our Alonzo the Brave."

" You will probably," I replied with great presence of mind, considering that I had no idea what she was talking about, " find him with the fair Imogene."

Here my landlady, with her eyes pene- trating the corners, gave a cry of rapture, " There he is ! Glory be ! " And she pounced on the black and purring stranger, who rose and stretched his back to a moun- tainous height and his jaws to a pink cavern.

" This is our Alonzo the Brave," and she pressed his rebellious head against the pins on her ample bosom.

" Oh, indeed," I said politely ; " and though he is your Alonzo the Brave, I hope you won't mind his being my preface, will you ? And may I ask what does he like best in the world besides Imogene ? "

Alonzo the Brave had partly wriggled out of her ardent embrace, so that he now hung suspended by his elastic body, while his legs dangled at amazing length, xiv

Mjy Preface

" Me," and my landlady simpered.

" I mean in the eating line," I explained.

Catnip, said his biographer, was his favourite weakness.

" Then get him a pennyworth of catnip and put it on my bill," I said benevolently. For, I thought as she carried him off struggling, even a poor preface is cheap at a penny, and without Alonzo the Brave there would have been no preface, and without his heroic ancestor the Modest would never have had a chance !

I do hope this explains the following pages. I have not, like Alonzo's ancestor, strictly confined my observations to kings. I have, indeed, ventured to look at all sorts of things, many of them very sublime, and solemn and important, and some less so ; and, as the following pages will prove, I have availed myself freely of the privilege of the Modest.

If the two greatest nations of the world have served me as " copy," it is because they are very near and dear, and the Modest, like more celebrated writers, have

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a way of using their nearest and dearest as " copy," especially their dearest.

In conclusion, I trust I have adequately explained, by help of Alonzo the Brave, that it is the privilege of the Modest to make observations about everything — whether anyone will ever read them, why — that's another matter.

A. E. L.

Kemptown, January, 1906.

XVI

My thanks are due to the Editors of The Fortnightly Review, Blackwood's Magazine, and The Outlook, for their kind permission to reprint some of the following pages.

Contents

Page

My Preface vii

The Champagne Standard ... i American Wives and EngHsh House- keeping 40

Kitchen Comedies 75

Entertaining 104

Temporary Power 130

The Extravagant Economy of Women 153

A Modern Tendency . . . . 171

A Plea for Women Architects . . 181

The Electric Age 188

Gunpowder or Toothpowder . . 196

The Pleasure of Patriotism . . . 211

Romance and Eyeglasses . . . 220

The Plague of Music .... 230

A Domestic Danger 245

A Study of Frivolity .... 259

On Taking Oneself Seriously . . 271

Soft-Soap 290

A ^^'

Champagne Standard

The Champagne Standard

THE other evening at a charming dinner party in London, and in that intimate time which is just be- fore the men return to the draw- ing room, I found myself tete-a-tete with my genial hostess. She leaned forward and said with a touch of anxiety in her pretty eyes, ''Confess that I am heroic?"

*'Why?" I asked, somewhat surprised. "To give a dinner party without cham- pagne."

It was only then that I realised that we had had excellent claret and hock instead of that fatal wine which represents, as really nothing else does, the cheap pre- tence which is so humorously characteristic of Modern Society.

"You see," she said with a deep sigh, "I have a conscience, and I try to reconcile

The Champagne Standard

a modest purse and the hospitality people expect from me, and that is being very heroic these days, and it does so disagree with me to be heroic! Besides, people don't appreciate your heroism, they only think you are mean!"

I realised at once the truth and absurdity of what she said. It does require tremen- dous heroism to have the courage of a small income and to be hospitable within your means, for by force of bad example hospitality grows dearer year by year. The increasing extravagance of life is all owing to those millionaires, and imitation millionaires, whose example is a curse and a menace. They set the pace, and the whole world tears after. Because solely of their wealth, or supposed wealth, they are accepted everywhere, and it is they who have broken down the once impassable barriers between the English classes, with the result that the evil which before might have been confined to the highest, now that extravagant imitation is universal, per- meates all ranks even to the lowest.

The old aristocracy is giving place to the new millionaires, and it gladly bestows

2

The Champagne Standard

on them Its friendship in exchange for the privilege of consorting with untold wealth and possible hints on how to make it. The dignity that hedges about royalty is indeed a thing of the past, since a bubble king of finance is said to have been too busy to vouchsafe an audience to an emperor.

There is -nothing in the modern world so absolutely real and convincing and uni- versal as its pretence. It has set itself a standard of aims and of living which can best be described as the Champagne Standard.

To live up to the champagne standard you have to put your best foot foremost, and that foot is usually a woman's. It is the women who are the arbiters of the essentially unimportant in life, the neglect of which is a crime. It is the women who have set the champagne standard. A man who lays a great stress on the importance of trivialities has either a worldly woman behind him, or he has a decided feminine streak in his character.

Yes, it is the champagne standard; for nothing else so accurately describes the

3

The Champagne Standard

insincere, pretentious, and frothy striving after one's little private unattainables. It is aspiration turned sour. Aspirations, real and true, keep the world progressive, make of men great men and of women great women; but it is the minor aspirations after what we have not got, what the acci- dent of circumstances prevents us from having, which make of life a weariness and a profound disappointment. Not the tragedies of life make us bitter, but the pin-pricks.

In America, for instance, one does not need to be so very old to be aware of the amazing changes in the ways of living, the result of an unbalanced increase of wealth which has brought with it the imported complexity of older and more aristocratic countries. It is the older civil- isation's retaliation against those bluster- ing new millions that have done her such incalculable harm. Indeed, it would have been well for the great republic had she put an absolutely prohibitive tariff on the fatal importation. The repubUcan simpHc- ity of our fathers is slowly vanishing in the blind, mad struggle of modern life —

4

The Champagne Standard

in a standard of living that is based on folly. It is easier to imitate the old-world luxury than the old-world cultivation which mellows down the crudeness of wealth and makes it an accessory and not the principal. Unfortunately we judge a na- tion by those of its people who are most in evidence, and do it the injustice of over- looking the best and finest types among its wealthiest class: men and women who are the first to regret and disown what is false and unworthy in their social life. We assume that the blatant, self-adver- tising nouveau riche, with whom wealth is the standard of success and virtue, is the national American type, instead of the worst of many types, whose bad example is as well recognised as a peril to character in America as in other countries. Wealth in all nations covers a multitude of sins, but in America, to judge from recent de- velopments, it would seem to cover crimes. Is not America now passing through a gigantic struggle, the result of the hideous modern fight for wealth, in which the common man goes under, while the reck- less speculators who juggled with his hard-

5

The Champagne Standard

earned savings use these same savings to fight justice to the bitter end ? Possibly in no other enhghtened country in the world could such titanic frauds, with such incalculably far-reaching effects, be so suc- cessfully attempted, and that by a hand- ful of men who had in their keeping the hopes of countless unsuspecting people who trusted to their honesty and uprightness.

The race for wealth in America has be- come a madness — a disease. It is not a love of wealth for what it will bring into life, of beauty and goodness, but a love of millions pure and simple. Who has not seen the effect of millions on the average human character ? Who has not seen men grow hard and rapacious in proportion as their millions accumulated ? Who has not seen the tendency to judge of deeds and virtue by the same false standard ? A shady transaction performed by a mil- lionaire is condoned because he is a million- aire and for no other reason. Without millions he would be shunned, but with them he is regarded with the eyes of a most benevolent charity. It is high time in- deed that a prophet should arise and

6

The Champagne Standard

preach the simple Ufe, but let him not preach it from below upwards. He must preach it to the kings of the world and the billionaires and magnates, and above all to the lady magnates; and let him be sure not to forget the lady magnates, for they are of the supremest importance and set the fashion. Let him turn them from their complicated ways. Now the ways of magnates and all who belong to them are very instructive. The well- authenticated story goes that at a dinner party the other night at a magnate's, — to describe his indescribable importance it is sufficient to call a man a magnate — after the ladies returned to the drawing-room, the hostess, her broad expanse tinkling and glittering with diamonds, leaned back in a great tufted chair — just like a throne en deshabille — and shivered slightly. Afoot- man went in search of the lady's maid.

"Frangoise," said the magnate's lady with languid magnificence, "I feel chilly; bring me another diamond necklace."

Yes, let the prophet first convert the magnate and the magnate's "lady" to a simpler life, then the simple life will

7

The Champagne Standard

undoubtedly become the fashion, for the small fry will follow soon enough. Are we not all Uke sheep ? And what is the use of arguing with sheep who are leaping after the bellwether ?

There is one safeguard for the American republic, and that is, in default of any other description, its ice-water-drinking class. In its ice-water-drinking class lies its safety, for that represents the back- bone of the repubhc. It represents a class which, in spite of the sanitary drawbacks of ice, is a national asset. It seems curi- ous to boast of the people who drink ice- water, and yet they represent American life, simple, sincere, and untouched by the sophistries of the champagne standard, and of a social ambition imported from abroad; decently well off people, but not so well off but that the only heritage of their sons will be a practical education. Already we are reaping the curse of in- herited wealth in America, where, unlike England, it has no duties to keep the balance. The English aristocrat has in- herited political duties and responsibilities towards his country which, as a rule, he

The Champagne Standard

faithfully performs, and which make of him a hard-working man. Unfortunately it is the fashion for the rich American, in his race for wealth and pleasure, or out of sheer indolence, to ignore politics and all that is of vital importance in national life. And until the best elements of the nation take a practical interest in the government of their country and in the administration of its great institutions, the nation cannot reach its highest development. Just now, unhappily, we have a warning example of what happens in America to the second generation that inherits instead of makes incalculable wealth. The District Attorney of New York, in a case which has shaken the foundation of all commercial rectitude, is quoted as saying of the still young man whom the accident of inheritance placed in a position of despotic power over millions of money and millions of modest hopes: "He is an excellent type of the second generation." It is an epigram which should be a warning, as the cause is a menace to American business methods. For did not Emerson say, studying American ways more than a generation ago when American life

9

The Champagne Standard

was simpler: "It takes three generations from shirt-sleeves to shirt-sleeves." But in that w^arning there is hope, for in the scatter- ing of wealth lies America's chance of salva- tion. Plain living and high thinking once characterised what was best in American life, and the men and women whose thoughts were high and whose living plain were mostly from that simple ice-water- drinking class that has produced much of the nobility and patriotism of America. That ice-water has helped to encourage dyspepsia, granted; but even a great virtue can have its defects.

How different was the America of our childhood! One remembers the time when, if the honoured guest was not invited to quench his thirst with ice-water at the hospitable board, he was, as a great treat, furnished with cider. Claret was the drink of those adventurous souls who had tra- ditions and had been abroad. There was no champagne standard — champagne only graced the table on solemn, state occasions. But in these rapid days the hospitable people who would once have offered you a serious glass of claret now give you cham-

10

The Champagne Standard

pagne. And because Smith, who can afford it, gives you good champagne, Jones, who cannot afford it, gives you bad champagne. But the bad and the good champagne are both tied up in white cloths, as if they had the toothache, so how awfully lucky it is that when the label is fifth-rate, Mrs. Jones, trusting in the shrouded shape, can offer bad champagne with ignorant satisfaction. It is interesting to study the evolution of Jones. There was Jones's father; he didn't pretend. He lived in a modest house and kept one servant and had a fat bank account. Old Mrs. Jones, a charm- ing woman with the manners of a duchess, helped in the housework. Old Jones dined all the days of his life at one o'clock, and had a "meat-tea" at six. At ten every night he ate an apple, and then he went to bed at ten-thirty. He left a handsome fortune to his children, who shared alike, which made Jones, Jr., only comfortably off. Now young Jones and his wife began by following in the footsteps of their parents, but Jones made money in business, and the result was that Mrs. Jones had aspirations. Aspirations are always a femi-

II

The Champagne Standard

nine attribute. So Jones bought a fash- ionable house, and instead of one servant Mrs. Jones keeps four; instead of a joint and pie, American pie, for which his simple appetite longs, Jones has a six- course dinner at eight which gives him dyspepsia. There is not the ghost of a doubt that Mrs. Jones is too afraid of the servants to have a plain dinner. And it is also quite certain that she goes to a fashionable church for a social impetus rather than divine uplifting, and that she sends her only child, Petra. Jones, to a fashionable kindergarten so that the un- fortunate child, who is at an age when she ought to be making mud pies, shall be early launched into fashionable friend- ships. Indeed, one day, in a burst of con- fidence, Mrs. Jones described how Petra had been snubbed. It seems that the Jones's child met another small school- fellow in the park in custody of the last thing in French nurses. Being only six and still unsophisticated in the ways of fashion, she rushed up to the young patri- cian and suggested their playing together. **No, I can't play with you," the young

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The Champagne Standard

patrician sniffed — "for my ma don't call on your ma."

Why is it that the pin-pricks of life are so much harder to bear than its tragedies ? Mrs. Jones mourned over this snub to the pride of Jones, but she has no leisure to observe that Jones, her husband, is mean- while growing old and hollow-eyed with care and business worries and the expense of aspiring. O champagne standard! O foolish Mrs. Jones!

As long as we can be snubbed and suffer what is the use of telling us that we are born free and equal ? The only Hberty we have is to breathe, and our equality con- sists in that, plebeian and patrician ahke, we are permitted to take in as much air as our infant lungs can accommodate. After that our equality ceases.

When Mrs. Jones goes to the expense of giving a dinner party, does she only invite her nearest and dearest, who are acquainted with the extent of Jones's purse ? Not a bit of it. She invites most of her enemies and some strangers. There really should be a limit to the attention one bestows on the stranger within his gates.

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The Champagne Standard

There was dear old Mrs. Carter Patter- son in the days of my youth. She was a funny old woman with a nose like a beak, a rusty Chantilly lace veil, and a black front. She stopped my mother in the street and explained that she was in a tear- ing hurry as she was about to call on Mrs. Mangles.

*'Why, I thought,'* and my simple mother hesitated, "I thought you said you hated her."

"So I do, my dear, so I do, but I always make a point of calling on my enemies, it's no use caUing on one's friends."

Who has not studied the increasing difficulty of that surgical operation called the launching of a young girl into modern society. Every year it grows more and more difficult — society seems to form a kind of trust to keep out the young girl, at least to judge from the extreme difficulty of getting her in; and after she is in, the bitterness of it, and vexation of spirit, only the young girl knows. The operation is different in different countries, though one has heard of the agonies endured in Eng- land during the process. In America the

H

The Champagne Standard

ceremony is as expensive as a wedding. Because one girl has had a huge coming- out reception, that shakes her pa's cheque book to its centre, why the other girl must have a still bigger one.

I have been a witness to the coming out of Maria's only child Nancy. The educa- tion of Nancy was not so much to teach her anything, as to give her the best opportunity of making fashionable acquaintances. It was my privilege to study her mother's heroic efforts to get Nancy into a fashion- able dancing-school, the entrance to which gave the fortunate one that supreme dis- tinction which nothing else could. Twice ** mother" failed, and she wept in my presence in sheer weariness of soul, but the third time Nancy got in — not trium- phantly, but she slipped in by some over- sight of a fashionable matron whose duty it was to keep out ineligible little children, and "mother" was happy, though the little ''400" boys in the round dances did neglect Nancy, who looked shyly and wistfully about, a small melancholy wall- flower, with her eyes swimming with tears, as the little boys wisely footed it with all

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The Champagne Standard

the most eligible of the ''400" little girls. It is very instructive to see how early the sense of worthy worldly wisdom develops itself!

But Nancy had passed through all these stages of social martyrdom, and had com- fortably hardened. Talk of the Spartan boy with the fox nibbling at his vitals! There are worse things than having a fox nibble at your vitals — Nancy knew.

When I met "mother" the morning of the coming-out of Nancy, she was nearly in a condition of nervous prostration. The house was in the clutches of florists and caterers, and father had fled to his office with the strict injunction not to appear until late in the afternoon. The awful problems were two: Would Nancy get as many bouquets as a rival "bud" — the technical name for a debutante — who had reached the acme of social distinction with two hundred and thirty-five, and would enough people come to make a show?

"I shall die if she doesn't get as many bouquets as that Bell girl," "mother" cried in an ecstasy of nervous anguish,

16

The Champagne Standard

"but she has only got two hundred and ten/'

"It's as bad as getting married," I cried sympathetically.

"Quite," and Maria groaned; "and with- out any real result."

Between a confusion of carpet cover- ing and potted plants I went upstairs in search of the "bud."

"Only two hundred and ten bouquets," she cried in a tempest of discontent, "and Betty Bell (the rival bud) is to have a five-thousand-dollar ball and I am not! Mother says it isn't giving the ball she'd mind, but it's people not coming. It's easy enough sending out invitations, but the mean thing is, people accept and don't come. That's the latest fashion," cried this bitter "bud." "Mother said she'd be mortified to death to give a ball and have nobody but the waiters to drink up the champagne. We're of just enough import- ance to have our invitations accepted and thrown over if anything better turns up."

Such was her perfectly justifiable wail.

That afternoon at six I came again in my best clothes. A reception is after all

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The Champagne Standard

the simplest of social functions. It en- tails no obligations, and is as democratic as an electric car. It is perhaps one of the few functions in which even the noblest society may use its elbows, and as a school for staring, the kind that sees through the amplest human body as if it were mere air, nothing could be more useful and practical. It is an interesting study to observe how the female lorgnette is on such occasions so triumphant an impedi- ment to sight.

Well, the whole street proclaimed the coming-out of Nancy. Carriages Hned the curbstones and an awning announced the festive nature of the occasion. A band, crowded into a cubby-hole usually sacred to "father's" overcoats and umbrellas, tried vainly to penetrate the talk — there was a dense crush of human beings, and over all there was a mixed aroma of hot air, flowers, and coffee. At the top of the "parlour," before a bank of flowers, and burdened with bouquets, stood Nancy, all in expensive white simplicity, her face radiant, and supported by an utterly ex- hausted mother. Six young men who served i8

The Champagne Standard

as ushers, in collars tall enough for a giraffe, brought up relays of friends to be intro- duced to mother and *'bud" — all just like a wedding, only the hero was wanting, and for "mother's" sake one did wish the occasion had had a hero. Last year's *'buds" were brought up and examined this year's **bud," and there was a great deal of chatter and hand-shaking, of the pump-handle kind, and a pushing past each other of magnificent matrons in the latest things in hats.

I was escorted up by one of the young giraffes, who solemnly introduced me. A mighty different *'bud" this from the one of the morning.

''I've got two hundred and forty bouquets," she whispered triumphantly; and just then I caught mother's weary eye and knew as absolutely as one knows any- thing in this uncertain world that "father" had sent in thirty. Really, there is nothing so loving, so generous and so weak in this wide world as an American father.

I was swept on by a crush of prosperous matrons accompanied by expensively simple daughters — the matrons making obviously

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The Champagne Standard

disparaging mental criticisms about each other's daughters. For real simple, un- assuming jealousy there is nothing hke rival mothers! So I was pushed into the dining-room where the chief ornaments were four Gibson girls in party frocks who, at a flower-laden centre-table, in the mel- low light of rose-shaded candles, dispensed glances, coffee, smiles, and tea, and other frivolous afternoon refreshments. They had the best of it, these beautiful young things at the table, especially when they could annex an occasional man.

At half past seven the last visitor had gone, the function was over and Nancy was "out," and '* mother" sat drearily on a couch which had the demoralised air of furniture horribly out of place. Every- thing drooped except those stalwart Ameri- can beauty roses, so costly, so splendid, so hard, and so unromantic. O national flower of Americans!

I caught a glimpse of "father" vanish- ing down the front steps on his way to the club. Nancy had flung herself into a big deep chair, and from this point she looked coldly at "mother."

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The Champagne Standard

"The Perkinses did not come," was all she said, but "mother" gave a start and groaned. The Perkinses represented the bloom of the occasion, and the Perkinses had not come. There was nothing further to be said — Maria did remark that it was as expensive as a wedding. "And to think it isn't dinner time yet," she added drearily.

"At any rate Nancy is 'out,'" I said.

"But it was horribly expensive."

"Well, then, what did you have all this expense and bother for ? "

"One has to do it," she cried in stony despair; "it's our standard — "

"Champagne standard," I interrupted.

"I don't know what you mean." Maria has all the virtues, but no sense of humour.

"Then, for goodness' sake, why have her come out at all ? "

Maria shuddered and looked cautiously about. Nancy had vanished.

"I'd die of mortification if she didn't marry. I won't have her turn on me and say I hadn't given her a chance."

"But, Maria, you married your good and prosperous Samuel without coming out. That didn't frighten him away! The

21

The Champagne Standard

highest standard your parents ever aspired to was cider, and that only on state occa- sions."

"That is all changed," said my unhappy friend. "We have got to — "

"Pretend; that's just it, Maria! But why don't you give up pretending and be happy ? Did our parents ever pretend ? They didn't. Think of your father's simple home and his big bank account, and then think of your Samuel with all his expenses and his cares."

But Maria was not to be convinced by argument — she was completely crushed by the Perkinses not having come, and she declared obstinately that her supreme duty in life was to get Nancy married — well if possible, but at any rate married.

Maria is only a type, but she stands for aspirations in the wrong place, and she is worn out with it. She has many virtues — that is, she has no vices. Her whole soul is wrapped up in Nancy. Nancy is her religion. She believes in Nancy, though she never took her Samuel seriously. She married him in the simple period of her

22

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existence, and by the time she began to aspire she had other ideals, and Samuel was more of a bore to her than an ideal. Samuel did not take to her new aspira- tions as readily as she. Men never do. Nancy constituted her romance; and yet she was an impartial mother, for mothers can be divided in two classes, those who are too partial and those who are impartial. Her mission in Hfe was to marry off Nancy.

"I'd rather she'd be married unhappily than not at all," she said to me one day when I saw her again. "A real unhappi- ness is more healthy to bear than an imag- inary one."

Nancy herself furnished the particulars of her own private creed.

"I'd rather be married even if I were unhappy. It's my own unhappiness, and I want my own whatever it is."

I suggested that there were other aims in life than getting married.

"Perhaps," she said, "but I haven't any. I've been brought up to that. Most girls are, only they don't tell. I haven't to earn my living and I haven't any talent for anything. If I don't marry, Ma'll be

23

The Champagne Stand ard

mortified to death and she'll show it and that'll make me mad. Father won't care and he won't notice that I'm growing older, though we girls don't grow old prettily. We get pinched, and our Httle hands — for we have little hands — grow clawy, and our hair gets thin at the temples, and we have too much gold in our front teeth. Of course we are real pretty when we are happy. But think of spending life seeing father go to sleep after dinner, and mother playing patience — ugh! I've told mother if she doesn't take me abroad I'll go slum- ming. There's no chance here. Half the men are too busy making money to get married and the others are afraid."

"So this is your education," I said later on to Maria; "I am glad you have only one child."

**So am I," said Maria wearily, "for two would kill me."

Then in a burst of confidence: "She hangs fire. She isn't strikingly plain nor strikingly beautiful, one's about as good as the other. She has no accomplish- ments, and her golf is only so so. She isn't fast, nor loud, nor smart. She is just 24

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an average girl and," Maria cried in vexa- tion, "there are such heaps of them. The luncheons and dinners and theatre parties I have given without resuk! It is so tire- some for her always to be bridesmaid. So we're going abroad. Father is willing to live at the Club. Our men are too comfortable to get married. It's simply wicked!"

"Maria," I said from my inmost con- viction, "you have manoeuvred, with the result that you have frightened off the eligibles — struggling eligibles, and those are sometimes the best. But what struggler would dare to ask a champagne-standard girl to keep his "flat".? It's flats these days. He wouldn't think of dragging a white-tuUed angel from a palatial residence to a flat and a joint! You have frightened off^ the young men. Marriage is getting out of fashion, and so are the comforts of a home. It's all your fault, you cham- pagne-standard mothers!"

Such was the coming-out of Nancy.

Now in my young days there was cer- tainly no formal coming-out. All I re- member is that one day I still wore my

25

The Champagne Stand ard

hair in two pigtails, and the next day old Mrs. Barnett Pendexter called. She was a fumbly old woman with her fingers, and by accident — my sisters always declared — she left two cards instead of one. The fatal result was that my pigtails were pinned up and I was dragged out by my mother when she made calls, for she de- clared, being socially learned, that now I was undoubtedly out. It was also a httle surgical operation in a minor way, but com- pared to these days how simple and how inexpensive.

If one were asked which of the passions is the greatest force in modern Society, one could safely reply "jealousy." Jealousy makes the world go round. Don't we want what all our neighbours have, and don't we want it with all our might and main ? If we want it badly enough crime will not stand in the way of getting it. Is it not at the bottom of most of our defalcations, embezzlements, and commercial dishonesty in general ^ The bank president who bor- rows the bank funds for his private use, the cashier who falsifies the books, the little clerk who embezzles as the result of 26

The Champagne Standard

expensive tastes, — are they not all the re- sults of the falsity and extravagance of modern life ? Compared to the judicious business man who keeps just within the border line that saves him from the criminal law, and who lays traps for his credulous fellow-creatures in the shape of alluring companies, the pickpocket, who runs some little risk, is a blameless and worthy charac- ter. The champagne standard is the whole world's measure, and even justice bows to it when it interprets its laws for the rich and the poor. A company promoter, who in the course of his career has wrecked thousands of lives, can, if he is only rich enough, consort with the noblest and most virtuous of the land; but of course he must be rich enough. Deny it who can ? Be rich enough and you are forgiven all crimes. O Champagne Standard!

Last year a certain deceased miUionaire was tried in London for gigantic frauds, and all the newspapers described how pleasantly he greeted his friends when he entered the court and took his seat behind his counsel. Positively not a bit proud. There was also a sympathetic description

27

The Champagne Stand ard

of his clothes! The moral is, be a scoun- drel on a magnificent scale and you are still respected; indeed, you even become a hero in some people's eyes. Justice being blindfolded cannot see, which is a great convenience. Besides, are we not taught that God helps those who help themselves ?

In America there is no aristocracy yet, but God help it when the time arrives, for it will be an aristocracy based on the most unworthy of foundations — money. As for romantic traditions, well, it will take several centuries to weave a halo of romance around a pork-packer, a petroleum mag- nate, a railroad wrecker, or the company promoters who flourish as the green bay tree. In centuries they may arrive at the dignity of being ancestors — at present they are just what they are, and are to be judged accordingly.

There is a growing mania in America these days for ancestors. It is a luxury which can be indulged in only after people have accumulated money. If you are grub- bing for your daily bread it is a matter of profound indiff^erence to you where you came from, seeing what you have reached 28

The Champagne Standard

is so unsatisfactory. But when your bank- book bursts with deposits and your greed for money is partly satisfied, it is natural that you should look out for new fields for your aspirations. So wealthy Ameri- cans are just now very busy unearthing ancestors, in spite of not becoming parents, and getting their genealogical tree planted, and rummaging in the dust of the past for possible forefathers, and buying family portraits. Yes, there is a great trade in family portraits — the dingier the better. At any rate it keeps the pot boiling for many a worthy painter, and that is some- thing. Not that one has a rooted aversion to ancestors — they are not to be despised if they leave you an honourable name, a nice old estate, and cash and some brains, but there are ancestors of whom the less said the better, and whose only legacy would appear to be a slanting forehead, a weak chin, and a tendency to unlimited viciousness.

The Herald's College could tell many a queer story of our sturdy republicans in search of their forbears. An EngHsh woman told me that a New York family

29

The Champagne Standard

had annexed a crusading forefather of her own, as well as one who had had his head chopped off, and to whom they had no more right than the grocer round the corner. She acknowledged that they were a pretty bad lot (the ancestors), but she objected to have strangers meddle with them. "You are funny republicans," she added genially, "coming over here and grabbing our ancestors."

Now there is nothing so frank as a frank Englishwoman. "What is the use of cele- brated ancestors," she added, "if your whole present family are as dull as ditch- water and bore you to distraction? I'd swap off my crusading ancestor and my chopped-off-head one any time for a cousin with brains. But mind you, I don't want your American millionaires grabbing 'em without leave."

There are the Bedfords of New York. Susan and I went to school together. Hitherto she has put on no airs with me, for I know the family traditions, and that her excellent father began life as a cobbler. Then he forsook cobbling and started a corset manufactory, which was a distin- 30

The Champagne Standard

guished success because he had invented a bone so like the whale's that even that clever fish could not have proved it wasn't his; and the deception made the old man's fortune. Thereupon he rose superior and soared from corsets to real estate, and in real estate he made what was briefly de- scribed as "mints." It was in the corset period that Susan married Joe Bedford who was a drummer in the business, and though he retired from corsets and went into real estate along with his father-in- law, Susan was always conscious that he could never accommodate himself to the grandeur of his new life. She had to do all the aspiring, and it was she who passed a sponge over their previous existence, and every time I saw them in New York she had added a new lustre to their glory. The last time the door was opened to me by a footman, brooded over, as it were, by the very noblest kind of English butler. I saw at once that the whole family were afraid to death of him. But in spite of her grandeur, Susan herself saw me down- stairs to the front door, in the American fashion, though conscious of the profound

31

The Champagne Standard

and stony disapproval of the English butler. As I came opposite the hat rack I caught sight of a satin banner covered with caba- listic characters floating gently over Joe's modest bowler that swung from a peg.

*'Our coat of arms," Susan explained by way of introduction. "Just come home. It cost a great deal; everything costs so much. We have the same arms as the Duke of Bedford. It is pleasant to have a duke in the family."

"Since when?" I asked, and stared in astonishment.

"I found them in the dictionary six months ago. I had it done at Tiffany's. It looks so stylish on the plates and the writing paper."

"Come in here, Susan," and I led her into her own parlour, for I did not wish to lower her in the estimation of that noble being who was preparing his mighty mind to show me out. "Listen to me; you and Joe haven't any more to do with the Duke of Bedford than the cat's foot. Besides, his name isn't Bedford but Russell. For goodness' sake don't make such an idiot of yourself."

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"I guess," and Susan was deeply of- fended, *'I guess the young man at Tiffany's knows more about it than you do. He engraves for the first families, and he said it was all right."

It was quite recently, too, that I crossed from Boston with three gentle female pil- grims in search of an ancestor. The youngest was nearly seventy, and \ye were barely out of sight of that famous tail of land called "Cape Cod" when they told me their simple story. They came from Cape Cod and their homestead stood on a sandhill and faced the sea. A long strag- gling street up a sand bank culminated in a meeting-house with a steeple as sharp as a toothpick. They were innocent and graphic old ladies and they had only two vivid interests in life; one was a Devonshire ancestor supposed to have died three hun- dred years before, and the other, two cats called respectively Priscilla and John Alden. The ancestor was the one romance of their placid lives, and it became a question of going to find him, now or never; so here they were. They had turned the key in the lock of their Cape Cod homestead and

The Champagne Standard

bidden a long farewell to Priscilla and John Alden, and as they described their grief I saw their three pairs of benevolent eyes fill with tears.

**The sweetest cats that ever breathed," said the oldest, with a face like a benedic- tion.

"What did you do with them?" I asked after a sympathetic pause.

"We chloroformed them," said the dear old thing whose face was like a benediction.

I offered up an involuntary smile to the manes of these deceased martyrs, Priscilla and John Alden, and I am absolutely sure the ancestor wasn't worth the sacrifice.

Fortunately or unfortunately, the cham- pagne standard, like hotel cooking, has no nationality. It is everywhere, and one studies it according to one's experience, but it is undoubtedly the curse of an age that only judges of success by material results. It is above everything a menace to character.

Modern life is the apotheosis of triviali- ties, and perhaps there is nothing more curious and melancholy than to observe their exaggerated importance to the world 34

The Champagne Standard

in general. One asks what is the use of such childish fretting to people confronted by tragic realities. What is the use of snubbing any one as if we were immortal ? The truth is, each, in his own estimation, is immortal. Who thinks of dying t Why, if we expected to die at once, we certainly would not snub any one, and, in the face of so tragic a probability, we would not notice being snubbed. And yet there is absolutely nothing so absolutely certain as death, before which every pretence, every ignoble aspiration, every sordid ambition, stands naked and futile and, in some other world possibly, ashamed.

But one cannot help wondering what kind of a blissful place the world would be without the champagne standard. How good and honest we should be if we didn't pretend — how easy it would be to live! Are not most of the trials of life, apart from its tragedies, its results ? Most of our harrowing anxieties usually have their rise in aiming at what is beyond our reach. And yet what, in the name of common sense, what is it all for ? What is the use of pretending ? What is the use of doing

35

The Champagne Stand ard

things badly when it is so much easier not to do them at all ?

Yes, indeed, the greatest heroism in these days is to have the courage of one's income. It is possibly a little awkward at first, but what a relief to be able to say simply, **I can't afford it," and not lose caste! But Modern Society is ruled over by "Appearances." Appearances are a kind of Juggernaut which requires our happiness and peace and contentment as a daily sacrifice — but not the wise and honourable appearances, but the little, mean, false ones, and those are the most common.

One is inclined to think, however, that even the champagne standard may yet find its Nemesis. For if the world goes on at its present rate all its wealth will in time be swallowed up by the Trusts, and the Trusts will in turn be swallowed up by the mighty maws of the few whom God, in his righteous wrath, permits to plunder the earth, just as He once permitted a deluge for the regeneration of the world. And the blessed result will be that the whole wide world, being as poor as the traditional

36

The Champagne Standard

church mouse, will come to its senses, and the first thing that will happen will be the abolishing of the champagne standard. So herein lies the world's salvation, to be saved it must be ruined; and for the first time Trusts may be looked upon in the light of the benevolent saviours of man- kind. When we are all as poor as the most plausible of them can make us, and that is saying a good deal, behold we shall then finally cease to pretend.

Of course each of us has his own ideal of the millennium, but with multi-million- aires setting the pace, and all the rest of the world racing after, it must be agreed that the millennium is not yet. But when it does come, there will be no more cham- pagne standard, and each person will be judged after his honest value and not his purse. If he has a noble soul nobody will mind if he is a bit shabby, and if he is a man of brains he may even live at the wrong end of the town. In that happy day everybody will have the courage of his income, no matter how small, and when one is shown hospitality it will not be according to the champagne standard, but

37

The Champagne Standard

according to a standard of honest kindness; and no matter how simple it is, if it is only a crust of bread, no one will criticise, and no one will apologise. If in that blissful time Jones dines in a cut-away, why not ? And yet is it not true in these days that Jones's fine character is often enough overlooked in a disapproving contempla- tion of his coat ?

However, the millennium has not arrived, and the simpler hfe, though the fashion as a subject for sermons, is certainly not practised — as yet.

Recently a king of finance gave a great musical function — the gambols of the rich and great are always called functions. There were so many biUionaires present that a modest millionaire was quite out of it. Everything was of the costliest, the lighting was entirely by radium, and the music provided was of an expense supremely worthy of even the consideration of billion- aires. The very greatest violinist had been induced, by the offer of a small fortune, to play, and indeed, while he played, the host and another billionaire intimate amused themselves calculating the money value of

38

The Champagne Standard

each tone at the rate the great artist de- manded for playing. Just as they finished, and he finished, and a languid murmur signified the approval of the glittering audience, the young daughter of the bil- lionaire host, who had, apparently, not received the last poUsh in the school of unutterable wealth, put an entreating hand on her father's arm:

"Do please introduce me," and she mentioned a very famous name, "he does play so divinely."

"My child," and the magnate, who had started life peddling tripe, spoke with haughty disfavour and drew his eyebrows together in a frown, "we pay such people, but we don't know them."

O Champagne Standard!

39

American Wives and English Housekeeping

THE CLEVER woman who wrote American Wives and English Hus- bands, put her Calif ornian heroine in a position in which the one problem she was not required to solve was English housekeeping. She might break her heart over her EngHsh husband, but the author does not add to our pangs by relating how her American bride, having first studied the peculiarities of her English- man, next varied her soul's trials by *'wrest- Hng" with the lower but equally irritating problems prepared for her by the English tradesmen. Under which general term are included all the male and female creatures who, having helped to set up a brand-new household, immediately proceed to hinder it from running.

The problem of English husbands I leave to more gifted pens, but I may perhaps be permitted to tell what the American woman 40

American Wives

experiences, who, having "pulled up stakes," plants herself on English soil. This era of international marriages is not at all confined to the daughters of American mil- lionaires who can afford the luxury of Eng- Hsh dukes. Nor, in giving my experiences, do I address the prospective Anglo-Ameri- can duchess, who would not be likely to spend several sleepless nights, trying to decide whether she should or should not take her carpets or the "ice-chest." How- ever, it is well to give one little word of advice to the American girl proposing to turn herself into an Enghsh-woman; and that is, she must be very sure of her Englishman, because for him she gives up friends and country, and he has to be that and more to her.

America has a bad reputation for being a very expensive place in which to live. The large earnings are offset, it is said, by expenses out of proportion to the wages. Both facts are exaggerated; and, in contrast- ing English and American housekeeping, one of the first reasons, I have decided, why English living flies away with money is that the currency itself tends to expense.

41

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To start with, the English unit of money value is a penny — the American a cent, but observe that a penny is two cents in value. I am asked eightpence for a pound of tomatoes ; I think "how cheap" until I make a mental calculation, "sixteen cents, that's dear." It is the guileless penny which, like the common soldier, does the mighty executions and swells the bill. One looks on the penny as a cent, and that is the keynote of the expense of living in London.

To go farther into the coinage: there is the miserable half-crown — it is more than half-a-doUar, and yet it only represents a half-dollar in importance. "What shall I give him ? " I ask piteously of my Eng- hshman when a fee is in question. "Oh, half-a-crown," is his reply. I obey, and mourn over twelve-and-a-half cents thrown away with no credit to myself.

Poor English people who have no dollar! Don't talk of four shillings! Four shillings are a shabby excuse for two self-righteous half-crowns. Oh, for a good simple dollar! Five dollars make a sovereign, roughly speaking — that wretched and delusive coin 42

American Wives

which is no sooner changed into shillings and half-crowns than it disappears like chaff before the wind. Now good dollars would repose in one's purse, either in silver or greenbacks (very dirty, but never mind!), and demand reflection before spending.

Think of the importance of a man's sal- ary multiplied by dollars! The wealth of France is undoubtedly due to her coinage — francs are the money of a thrifty middle- class — the English coinage is intended for peers of the realm and paupers. A hundred pounds a year is not a vast income, but how much better it sounds in dollars — five hundred dollars; if, however, you multi- ply it by francs, twenty-five hundred francs, why it sounds noble! Count an English- man's income by hundreds, and it does seem shabby! Dollars, when you have four thousand to spend, represent a value quite out of proportion to the eight hundred pounds they really are.

Change your English coinage — don't have half-crowns or sovereigns, but nice simple dollars (call them by any other name if you are too proud to adopt dol- lars), and see the new prosperity that will 43

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dawn on the middle-classes. A little trades- man struggling along on one hundred and fifty pounds a year will feel like a capitalist on seven hundred and fifty dollars. This is not straying from the subject, for it was my first observation in English economics.

On the other hand, the days have passed in America for the making of sudden and great fortunes, nor are the streets paved with gold. The lady from County Cork does not step straight from the steerage into a Fifth Avenue drawing-room (unless by way of the kitchen), but there's work, and there are good wages; and if the lady from County Cork and her brothers and cousins would work as hard in Ireland as they do in the United States, that perplex- ing island would bloom like a rose. That their fences are always tumbling down, even over there, and their broken windows stuffed with rags, is only an amiable national trait to which the Irish are loyal even in America, just to remind them of home.

"Everything is cheaper in England," they

all said when the decisive step whether to

take or leave the contents of our large

house had to be taken. "It won't be

44

American Wives

worth packing, taking, and storing. Send everything to auction."

That was the advice. I compromised, and one day half of the dear famiUar household gods were trundled off to be sold — alas! and the elect were left to be packed. Every American house has a grass-grown, fenced-in space at the back of the house called a yard, for the drying and bleaching of the laundry. Ours was invaded by three decent men and piles of pine boards, and then the making of cases and the packing began.

The packing was contracted for. The chief of the firm came, looked through each room, estimated, and gave us the price of the whole work completed and placed on the freight steamer. One is told that the English are the best packers in the world, but I have had more damage done in two cases sent from Bristol to London than in eighty cases sent from Boston to Liverpool. The three men worked three weeks, and then took all the cases out of the house and put them on the freight steamer, and the price of all this wonderful packing was about forty pounds. What will surprise 45

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an English person is that not one of these men expected a fee. My one ceaseless regret is that I did not take everything, from the kitchen poker to the mouse-trap.

On the arrival of our eighty cases in London, they were received by the ware- house people, who sheltered them until the brand-new English house was ready, which was not for a year. The packing, sending, and storing of all this furniture was under one hundred pounds, which, with my Eng- lish experience, I knew would have bought nothing. I did question the wisdom of bringing carpets, and I do not think it pays unless they are very good and large — the remaking and cleaning cost too much to waste on anything not very good. Having my furniture safely landed, the next step was to get a house.

One finds that the moderate rents asked for English houses is misleading, for in ad- dition the tenant is expected to pay the rates and taxes, which add to the original rent one-third more, only somehow this fact is ignored. Get a house for one hundred and fifty pounds, and you can add fifty pounds to that by way of rates and taxes. Nor does 46

American Wives

that enable you to get anything very gor- geous in the shape of a house, but one ob- tainable for about the same price in New York or Boston, minus those comforts which Americans have come to consider as a matter of course, until they learn better in England. Only in flats are the rates and taxes included in the rent, and when flats are desirable they are expensive.

Now, living in flats is undoubtedly the result of worrying servants, and it is ob- taining here as rapidly as the English ever accept a new idea — but being impelled by despair they are becoming popular. Small flats for "bachelor-maids" and childless couples are abundant and well enough, but for families who decline to be trodden on by their nearest and dearest these are nearly impossible, and when possible very dear.

The "flat" contrived for the "upper middle classes" is a terror, and is devoid of the comforts invented by American inge- nuity and skill, and the good taste which makes American domestic architecture and decoration so infinitely superior to all. I do not wish to be misunderstood — if money is no object one can be as com-

47

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fortable in London as in New York, but I am only addressing the "comfortably off."

In New York I was taken to see a very inexpensive flat, which proved to me that the average man can make himself thoroughly comfortable there. It was in an "apartment house" near Central Park. The street was broad and airy. To be sure the flat was up three flights, and there was no lift — but that is nothing. It con- sisted of four rooms, besides a kitchen and bathroom, and a servant's room. It was entirely finished in oak, and the plumbing was all nickel-plated and open, and it was furnished with speaking tubes. In the nice kitchen was an ice-box, and the kitchen range was of the best. This model flat cost six pounds a month, including heating, and could be given up at a month's notice.

No model flat turning up here, we were reduced to take a house, for which we were wiUing to give from one hundred and fifty to two hundred pounds. The agony of that search, and the horror of the various mansions offered! For the first time I rec- ognised the wisdom of putting no clothes- closets in London houses, when I think of 48

American Wives

the repositories of dirt they would inevitably become.

At that time I was not on such inti- mate terms with the climate as I have since become, and did not understand that it is humanly impossible to rise triumphant over fogs, smuts, and beetles. For my benefit, grim and dingy caretakers rose out of the bowels of the earth as out of a temporary tomb (always in bonnets), and showed us over awful houses in which every blessed thing had been carried away, even to the door knobs and the key-holes — that is of course the metal around the holes.

Awful, closetless houses, guiltless of comfort, with dreary grates promising a six months' shiver, and great gaunt win- dows rattling forebodingly. As for the plumbing — but it is well to drop a curtain over the indescribable. One does protest, however, against the people who live in these houses — houses whose discomfort an American artisan would not tolerate — looking with ineffable self-complacency on their methods, and sniffing at our Ameri- can ingenuity and our determination to make life comfortable.

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Of course we got a house, thanks to no estate agent, but as we could not rent it we had to buy it — or rather the thirty- eight years' remnant of a lease — a myste- rious arrangement to an American. It was rather hard to feel that the house and all our little improvements would, after thirty-eight years, revert to the Bishop of London, to whom the estate belongs, but we thought that after thirty-eight years we might not be so very keen about it. So we disturbed an aged woman in a dusty crape bonnet, and some friendly beetles, and they left the premises simultaneously.

We took an architect on faith, who was to be our shield and protector against the contractor ; then we folded our hands, as it were, and retired to an hotel and pro- ceeded to recover from the horrors of house-hunting. This interval was taken by the tradesmen of our new neighbourhood to recommend themselves to me, whose address they discovered by some miracle. They grovelled before me, they haunted me with samples — eggs, cream, butter, bread, followed me to the ends of England, and I finally succumbed to the most energetic.

50

American Wives

Gradually, one gets accustomed to ''patronage" and ''patron," rare words in America, where the "I am as good as you" feeling still obtains. I am becoming used to them as well as "tradesmen" and "class." I acquiesce in a distinct serving class, conscious that not to be aware of the dividing gulf would mean the profound scorn of those we have agreed to call our inferiors.

To return to the house. The architect and I looked it over — everything was wanting. The plumbing was new, but clumsy and inadequate. In an American house much less costly, there would be a hanging cubpoard in each room, thus dis- pensing with the clumsy and expensive wardrobes. The plumbing would be pretty and nickel-plated, resisting the action of the air, and easily kept clean. Here it is always brass or copper, clumsy and easily tarnished.

The architect suggested only the obvious, and with unwarranted faith I hardly ven- tured to suggest anything; but when the summer brought an American friend, who looked over the house, then approaching

51

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completion, she sat on the sohtary chair and shook her head.

"He hasn't thought of a single thing," she cried. ** Think of not having a dumb- waiter (English: dinner-lift) in this un- heated house. Stone walls and cold blasts — don't invite me to your lukewarm re- pasts! Besides you must have a hardwood floor" (parquet floor) '*in your drawing- room" (being an American she really said parlor). "Think of all the dirty carpets it will save," she urged. "My dear, you don't mean to say that you will live in this Bunker Hill Monument of a house" — she comes from Boston) — without speaking tubes?" She was aghast.

"What an architect! Supposing you want to speak to the cook, why you'd have to run down four flights for a tete-a-tete; then supposing you want coals up four flights — must the maid climb up four flights to find out what you want before doing it .? My dear, even an English servant has human legs, and she can't stand it."

I was convinced. I spoke to the archi- tect, and he was politely acquiescent, and as all these very necessary suggestions came

52

American JF ive s

late they were doubly expensive, and now I have come to the conclusion that domestic architecture is the proper field for a woman with ideas — a mere man-architect does not know the meaning of comfort, ingenuity, resource, and economy.

As the house declined to get done, I braved the architect, the contractor, and the workmen, and arrived one day in com- pany with a bed, a table, and a chair (also a husband), and took possession.

I did have one treasure at the time — a caretaker. She saved my life, and she pro- tected my innocent self from the British tradesman, whilst she gently taught me what the British servant will and will not do. She informed me when I was paying twice as much as right to the obsequious tradesman, and she regulated the (to me) perplexing fee. She was very religious, and I think she looked upon me as her mission and that she was to rescue me — which she did. Her wages were one pound a week including her food, and to be just I could not have got such a treasure in America at the price.

The most obvious defect we discovered

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in our house was that it was very cold — a universal English drawback — and the inadequate open fires seem to accentuate the chill.

Would that my feeble voice could do justice to the much-calumniated American methods of heating! It does pay to be less prejudiced and more comfortable! Possibly the furnace and steam heat may be a Httle overdone, but not with moderate care. No one can make me believe that it is healthy to sit shivering all over, or roasting on one side and freezing on the other. Neither do I consider a red nose and chilblains very ornamental. I admit that furnaces are not a crying need in England all through the winter, but from December to March it is a pretence to say you are com- fortable, for you are not. There is no doubt but New England has bad throat and lung troubles, yet so has Old England and the hardening process does not save, if statistics are right. If I must take cold and die, at least I prefer to do so comfortably.

If there were a furnace I should not need gas-stoves (which are certainly no more poetic than a register or a radiator, besides 54

American Wives

being distinctly sham), nor would there be a perpetual procession of coal-scuttles going upstairs, unless an open fire is desired for additional warmth and cheerfulness.

This brings one to the relative costs of coal, water, and gas. London coal is greasy, soft, and dear. Where the hard coal is burned in the States, it leaves white cinders and ashes. It burns slowly and is therefore very profitable, and the price averages about twenty-four shillings a ton. Must the cheek of English beauty always be adorned with "blacks"?

The water-rates here are just double those of Boston, where, O rapture! we had two bathrooms, and where the "sidewalk'* (American for pavement) was thoroughly washed every morning. In Boston gas was charged for at the rate of four shillings for one thousand cubic feet; here we pay three shillings for the same, and yet for infinitely less gas used our bills here are mysteriously larger. Our London elec- tricity is both expensive and poor; con- sumers are at the mercy of the companies, and a little wholesome competition is very imperative.

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The English arc reckoned a nation of grumblers, but one finds that the grumbler ends in grumbling, though in moments of supreme anguish he writes to The Timesy which permits, with the impartiality of Divine Providence, both the just and the unjust to disport in its columns.

Considering the papering and painting of the house done — the painting done very roughly from our point of view. Then the kitchen needed a new range and so we got the most expensive of its kind — expensive for America even — but the acknowledged soHdity of English workmanship (which sometimes becomes clumsiness) is well in place here. The dinner-lift had been con- structed for one flight, and was surprisingly dear, while the parquet floor in the drawing- room cost twenty-seven pounds where it would have cost fifteen pounds in America.

This brings me to a point on which I wish to lay great stress: the remarkable progress in America in all the applied and domestic arts within the last ten years, which leaves England far behind. Our English house was just old enough to be surprisingly ugly — it belongs to the early

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American Wives

Victorian period. Without wishing to spend too much money in its decoration, we did feel that we ought to put away the funereal mantel-pieces and set up something more aesthetic.

Our architect — always obliging and never suggestive — took us to see wooden mantel- pieces, and we found them expensive and clumsy. In this strait my Englishman had an inspiration. "Buy them in New York" — we were just going over — "and you will find them prettier, better, and cheaper even if the freightage has to be added to the price."

I would not believe him because I also was still labouring under the delusion that England was cheap and America dear. However, we went to New York and there we bought three wooden mantels — six feet high and six feet wide — of the best quar- tered oak, of so simple and graceful a design that they are always noticed and admired. These three were packed, sent, and landed at our front door in London, and the price, all included, was not much more than we should have paid for the only one in Lon- don of which I approved. I feel con-

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vinced that there is a great market here for American wood-work as well as leather, iron, and glass, for with English excellence of workmanship they combine a taste which adapts the best to its own uses. It would revolutionise the decoration of English houses.

The American has the advantage that he is not conservative where that stands between him and progress. That some- thing was good enough for his ancestors is no reason why it should satisfy him. Because they chose to freeze is no reason why he should. Somehow, one always comes back to the inadequate heating, for as I write, my face is flaming while a lively icicle penetrates my spine.

The carpets being now down, I sent to the warehouse for the eighty cases, and after a year again looked at my house- hold gods. They were very skilfully un- packed, but (here is the difference between the English and the American workman) each one of the men expected a fee every time he moved a box for me. Every time I went to the warehouse to open a trunk one or two men had to be fee'd, and at

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the end it came to quite a little sum. In America, this would not have been expected, even for harder work done, and quite rightly, for the men were receiving proper wages, and I was paying the Stor- age Company liberally.

Our American furniture being cosmopol- itan it was speedily at home in our Eng- lish rooms; only these high studded rooms have such a way of devouring furniture! I thought piteously of that which I had rashly flung into the Boston auction-room, and when it came to replacing it, what did I find ? That American furniture is much better and much cheaper. My soul yearned even for the big black chest of drawers which I had left behind, and it loathed the brand-new "art furniture," sticky with paste and varnish.

I demanded Chippendale and such — but, alas! their day is over, except for mil- lionaires! Praed Street, Brompton Road, Great Portland Street, and Wardour Street should blush for the faked-up antiquities that ogle the passerby. I have no preju- dice against modern furniture if it is good; nor do I love old furniture simply because

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it is old, but undoubtedly the old taste was artistic and simple, and workmen had plenty of leisure and used their hands. But when it comes to American or Eng- lish machine-made furniture I prefer the American because, it is in better taste, is made of better wood, and is cheaper.

I paid twenty-four shillings apiece for painted pine chests of drawers for the ser- vants. In New York I saw a pretty one, all of oak with brass handles, for thirteen shillings. That is only a sample. Per- haps it is ungenerous urging the impor- tation of American wares that can, because of English free trade, undersell the English manufacturer, but it remains true that it can be done, and ought to be done, and com- petition will improve the home produce, and there is room for improvement.

Well, having finally got my dwelling into some kind of order, I and my new British and old American household gods pro- ceeded to keep house together.

This brings me to the question of Eng- lish and American domestic service. It is an article of faith that America being the home of the free (and independent) will 60

American Wives

before long have no servants, but only "mississes." It is not quite so bad, by any means. To be sure wages are much higher, but the American servant does twice the work of an English servant.

The average American family keeps two servants and a man who comes in twice a day to "tend" the furnace — the central stove which heats the entire house. The cook gets fifty pounds a year, the house- maid forty pounds, and the man, who gets neither food nor lodging, eighteen pounds. The total is one hundred and eight pounds, which includes the baking of all the bread and the doing of the weekly laundry for the entire house; the only additional expenses being for coal and soap.

Now for the wages in an English family of the same standing: — Cook thirty-five pounds, parlour-maid twenty-six pounds, housemaid twenty pounds, char-boy eight pounds, and fifty pounds to the laundry for v/ork which is quite disgraceful. The sum total is one hundred and thirty-nine pounds, which does not include the feeding of an additional person, and a servant's board is a greater expense than her wages.

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Distinctly the economy is on the American side.

That the servant business is a trade was a fact impressed on me for the first time by my very intelligent English cook. Each Enghsh servant has her trade which she knows and she declines to meddle with what she does not know, for which reason the dividing lines are rather strictly laid down. It was something I had to learn so as not to call on one servant to do the duties of another. Our American servants are more liberal, but now I realise that a good Eng- lish servant is not so much an amateur as an American; but unless you wish to be unpleasantly enlightened as mistress, you must learn her line of duty well.

To keep house one must have servants, and in a strange place the first problem is how to get them. Supposing no friend can recommend you one, you are reduced either to advertising or the registry office. Regis- try offices, through which the majority of sufferers get their *'help," riot in ungodly prosperity. They have managers and clerks, like a bank and, like other corporations, they have no souls. If you are a meek 62

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lady they snub you, and if you are unde- cided they give you bad advice. At any rate the unscrupulous ones, and there are plenty of these, take your fee whether you get a servant or not.

It seems as if a certain amount of honesty should obtain even in this business, and I protest against paying five shillings for the mere joy of talking to a stately female, the presiding goddess in the generally ill-venti- lated temple, who pockets my money and, as soon as my fee is safe, takes no further earthly interest in me. The methods of Eng- lish registry offices seem to me the brazenest kind of piracy. Why don't English women rebel ? Are they not the daughters and wives of grumblers, and probably the mothers also ? However, fate was kind to me, and I got three servants, two of good village families, while the superior cook was the legacy of a brilliant woman, a good deal of whose wisdom I have since had at second-hand.

In the economy of the universe I know that there is a serving class, but we people of New England are not glib in the use of the word ''servant." Do we not (in the

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country) call them "helps" when the ex- pression is base flattery ? Here, class dis- tinctions have put the matter on a practical footing — servants are servants and recog- nise themselves as such, and have that outward and visible sign of well-trained domestics which the Irish girl, direct from her paternal pig-sty, scorns in New York.

"You must not think," said my intelligent cook, "that we don't have our feelings as much as you." There it was, and she put herself as a matter of course on quite a different plane of human beings; the Ameri- can servant, on the other hand, would con- sider herself of the same class, but ill-used by circumstances. A clever woman once said to me, "You can't expect all the Christian virtues in the kitchen for five dollars a week!" But we do! Perhaps the most precious gift I received when I left Boston was this advice: "Don't see too much."

Servants are hke children; to keep them under control you must impress them. They object to a mistress who is too clever with her hands, but they like her praise. An American servant does not lose respect for 64

men can fr t ve s

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a mistress who, if necessary, can "lend a hand," but the EngHsh servant sees in such readiness a distinct loss of dignity. Many a time have my American servants seen me on the top of a step-ladder doing some- thing that required more intelligence than strength, and they have respected my power to '* do." Here something keeps me from the top of the step-ladder — instinct probably.

An American treats her servants more considerately than an Englishwoman. I am conscious of saving my servants too much; often (I confess it with shame) I run down a flight or two to meet them, and there is no doubt that the more I do the more unwilling and ungrateful they become.

With three English servants, besides a boy (not to speak of the laundry), now doing the work of two American servants, I proceed. I have mentioned a vital and nearly fatal subject — the laundry. In Lon- don it is awful but inevitable, and one cannot wonder any more at the stupendous dirt of the lower classes. Are their things ever washed, and if so who pays ? After much observation I have decided that they

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make up by a liberal use of starch what they lack in soap and water and "elbow- grease."

Language fails an American direct from the land of clear skies, sunshine and soap and water, when she contemplates the har- rowing results of steam laundries. Really the most expensive of luxuries in London is to keep clean! When on Sunday after- noons one sees in Kensington Gardens a poor infant with a terribly starched and dirty cap on its head (in the form of a muffin), enveloped in an equally dirty and starched cape, and carried by a small girl in fearfully starched and dingy petti- coats, one recognises maternal pride which rises superior to London dirt.

I am the client of a "model" laundry which sends our linen back a deUcate pearl- grey. We call it affectionately the "mud- dle" laundry, and it costs us one pound a week to keep up to the pearl-grey standard. I wish we could go back to the days of chain-armour! What remedy? There is none, except country laundries for the rich and great, and starch for the poor! The only result of soft coal and dire necessity 66

mer I c an fr ives

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is the excellence and cheapness of the cleansing establishments, without which the long-suffering householder would in- deed sit in sack-cloth and ashes!

The one aim in furnishing our little house has been to keep the rooms free from all unnecessary draperies, which are merely traps for dust. It is hard for me to curb my feminine taste, which runs to sofa cushions and Oriental nooks lighted by Venetian lamps, but the exigencies of the London climate make me strictly Colonial (New England Colonial), and I can look into every corner — blessed privilege. The laundry being an accepted evil, one insti- tution I willingly proclaim cheap — the scrub-woman who gets half a crown a day. Why don't all English scrub-women emi- grate to the States in a body ? They would get from six to eight shillings a day, overtime overpay.

Coming to the details of housekeeping. The custom here is that tradesmen call for orders. That also obtains in America, but many ladies there go to the markets and select and order for themselves, which is distinctly more economical. Here, as

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the result of inadequate storage room, the expense of ice, and the by no means common use of the ice-box, there is not much food kept in the house. Now the laying-in of a good supply once or twice a week, if the mistress understands ordering and goes where she pleases, is undoubtedly cheaper than a daily ordering of driblets. It is the same with groceries, and these should be kept under lock and key! To the American that is not only an impossi- bility, it is nearly an insult, and I know of not a single American housekeeper who weighs out the groceries and other articles to be used week by week. It seems to start the mutual relationship of mistress and maid on a basis of suspicion.

A tabulated list of values is useless where prices fluctuate. I simply compare the differences as I have found them in my own httle housekeeping. Meat, with the exception of fillet and sirloin, is dearer here, and so is poultry. Groceries average about the same, but coffee and flour are dearer. So are butter and eggs. Milk is the same, but tea, dear to the English heart, is so cheap that one can undermine one's ner- 68

American Wives

vous system at a very small expense. Vege- tables are good and cheap, but there is httle variety, while fruit is dear.

How one does miss the ordinary cheap, good fruits, the California grapes and the Concords with their clusters of deep blue berries, a five-pound basket of which only costs a shilling. These were first grown in the old New England town that Emerson made famous. As for apples, pears and peaches, they are among the cheap fruits over the sea, and I maintain their superi- ority to their English kin.

What oranges equal the Floridas ? The "forbidden-fruit" and the "grape-fruit," are only just making their conquering way into the English shops. If, as it is claimed, the one is the forbidden fruit of the Gar- den of Eden, Eve is nearly justified!

Yes, there are many good things in America and at reasonable prices. One has only to think of the divine " sweet corn " and "squash" and "sweet potatoes," and even the modest white bean from which all New England makes its national dish of "pork and beans."

Fish there is in great variety in London, 69

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but that also I find dear. How is it pos- sible for me to live in a land where lobsters and oysters are a luxury and not a necessity ? Only a housekeeper knows what a refuge they are in trouble — when an unexpected visitor turns up. Is not the "oyster stew" (a soup of milk and oysters) an American national dish ? But it could only reach perfection in that blessed land where to eat oysters is not to suck a copper key, and where they exist in regal profusion. I look with scorn at the measly, little lobsters for each of which the fishmonger demands three ridiculous shillings instead of one shilling and three pence. My heart longs for lobster a la Newhurg till I remember that it takes three of these poor creatures to make the dish — nine shillings! So I continue to yearn and keep my nine shillings. I cannot, however, leave the subject with- out expressing my admiration for the beauty of the English fish shops and butcher shops. To see a fish shop in London is to see a trade haloed with poetry. If I were a fishmonger I would sit among my stock-in-trade and be inspired. The fishmonger is an artist, he constructs pictures of still-life which would 70

American Wives

have been revelations to the greatest of Dutch masters. In America our fish shops are devoid of poetry — the only compensa- tion being to see the mountainous piles of oysters, ready to be opened, and innumer- able great red lobsters.

To one item of American economy I wish to return with added stress; that is, the baking of bread in each house. This household-bread, if well made, is deUcious, substantial, and economical. Usually the cook bakes twice a week, and besides that she is expected to have ready for break- fast either fresh baked "biscuits" (scones), ''muffins," or '* pop-overs." The yearly allowance of flour for each person is one barrel, and one reckons the expense to be about half what bread costs here. The English "double-decker" is a fearful and wonderful production that errs on the side of heaviness, just as the American baker's bread errs on the side of frivolous lightness, and nourishes like froth.

Whenever Americans proclaim the cheap- ness of a visit to London one finds without exception that they live here as they would not dream of living at home. Were they to

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take lodgings there in the same economic manner, they could live quite as cheaply.

Another inexpensive commodity — which becomes very expensive in the end — is cabs. There is no doubt that they are cheap, and the fatal result is that they are used to an extent which makes them a serious item of expense to a family of moderate means. In America we pay two shillings each for a short drive in that stately vehicle called a "hack," and the price is prohibitive for an average family except on "occasions." So cab fares are not a serious item in domestic expenses.

From experience, I beheve that America has a very unmerited reputation for ex- pense. Live well, even if not ostenta- tiously, in London, and it costs fully as much as in New York or Boston. One does not judge by millionaires or beggars, for both are independent of statistics, but by the middle classes. Houses are here singularly devoid of comforts, and, taking the same income, I should say a middle- class American family could live there as cheaply as here, but with more comfort; and when it comes to schooling for chil-

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dren, an item to which I have not alluded, with infinitely greater advantages.

In writing down these desultory reflec- tions, I have been actuated by the thought that what I have learned may be of use to some puzzled American creature, who, having married an Englishman, proposes to live in England with only American standards to guide her. She must not believe, as I was told, that an American income will go one-third farther here. It does not. She must be prepared to accept other methods, even if, secretly, she modi- fies them a little to suit her American notions; but she must not boast, for her well-meaning efforts will, at best, be regarded with good- natured tolerance.

How I wish I could clap a big, stolid, conservative, frost-bitten English matron into a snug American house, with a furnace, and heaps of closet (cupboard) room, and all sorts of bells and lifts and telephones, and then force her to tell me the absolute, unvarnished truth! What would she say?

In conclusion, I wonder if I, as an exiled American sister, might make a plea to my American brethren ? It is that when they

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send their wedding invitations, as well as others, printed on their swellest "Tiffany" paper, they will kindly put on enough post- age. Why should one have to pay five- pence on each joyjul occasion ? On some, bristling with pasteboard, I have even had to pay tenpence, — why add this pang to exile ?

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Kitchen Comedies

MY superior cook had just given me notice, and I felt that the bottom had dropped out of the universe. She was an ancient retainer, according to twentieth-century standard, for she had been with me three months.

Her claim to fame rested on her once having cooked for Lord Kitchener. When- ever we had a trifling difference of opinion, which was seldom, because I didn't dare, she always retorted that she had cooked for Lord Kitchener, and, of course, I reahsed that I was but an unworthy successor to that great man. I suffered a good deal from his lordship in those days, and fervently pray that Fate will not throw in my blameless path either his parlour-maid or his laun- dress.

I had felt so safe, for cook lured me on with false hopes: she offered to make mar- malade, and she demanded a cat. This was tantamount to staying for ever. She

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made the marmalade, and we scoured the neighbourhood for a cat.

It may be a digression, but I really must remark here on the scarcity of any particular commodity of which one happens to stand in need. If the world can be said to be overstocked by any one article it really might be said to be cats; but had we been in search of a Koh-i-noor it could not have been more hopeless. We waited three months for a cat to be made to order, so to speak, and the very day his godmother left — we named him in honour of our departed cook — he appeared in the person of a long, lank, rattailed, ignominious tabby, on whom food made no earthly impression. His name is Boxer — Mister Boxer.

There is a great daily paper in London in whose columns the nobility and gentry clamour for what the Americans delicately call **help." I have myself pressed into four alluring lines a statement of the advan- tages I had to offer, and have received no reply. I have answered thirty-five advertis- ing parlour-maids, enclosing stamped enve- lopes, and have had no reply. My cook having retired from the scene, and there

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being nothing left to remind me of her but Mister Boxer, I again sought solace in those delusive columns.

'*What have I done," I cried in anguish, "that all cooks should avoid me?"

Just then my dearest friend was an- nounced; at least, she is as dear as distance will permit in London.

"What's happened?" she asked at once.

I explained mournfully that cook had gone.

"Whenever we had company she always said it wasn't Lord Kitchener, though I never said it was."

"I wish to goodness," and my friend flung herself into the nearest chair, "that my cook would go."

For a moment I gasped; it sounded so audacious.

"Give me a new cook every week," she cried, "but deliver me from eating the same cooking for twenty-six years, as we have done. Adolphus says he has eaten four thousand French pancakes filled with raspberry jam, in that time, and that he'll die if he eats another one. I don't blame him," she added gloomily, "but what are we to

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do ? I've urged her to better herself, but she won't. She quarrels with every servant who comes into the house; she's as deaf as a post, and she cooks abominably unless we have a dinner-party. If we weren't poor I'd pension her off; but we can't afford it," and she gave a bounce of resignation. "So don't talk to me of ancient family retainers; I'm sick of them!"

"You don't know what you are talking about," I said solemnly. "Listen to me. Last week I read an advertisement put in by a lady for her cook who was leaving — a cook with all the Christian virtues. I decided to answer it at once, but then I remembered the thirty-five who never replied to my letters. Just then He came down, placid and smiling — you know his way — and I explained to him that an Honourable Mrs. Smith was advertising for a place for her cook, in whom she took a personal interest.

"'My dear,' he said, * don't write! Hire an ambulance and fetch her back, for a cook so recommended cannot be long for this world.'

"I took his advice and flew there in a

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hansom, and I was so excited that I forgot to watch the horse's ears. It was ten o'clock when I reached the Honourable Mrs. Smith's, and it was just like a smart *at home.' At first I thought we had gone to the wrong house. Five ladies were going in, and I passed six in the hall. There were several reception-rooms and not a chair without a lady. A perplexed, wil- lowy creature without a hat, who turned out to be the Honourable Mrs. Smith, led me to a seat under an imitation palm-tree, and said it was dreadful and that she would never do it again. Her cook had received forty-five letters and twenty wires; and fifteen messenger-boys and thirty-two ladies had called.

"There were twenty letters from persons of title. Of course, I thought of Lord Kitchener, and felt it useless to stay, but as I had come the Honourable Mrs. Smith advised me to wait; she was very civil.

*'Now, you know my three rules: I won't have mixed religions in the kitchen because of squabbles; I won't take a servant out of a 'flat'; and I don't want one who wears glasses.

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**When the paragon and I met under the imitation palm, I found she was all I did not want. She questioned me severely, and said that she was a Roman Catholic. I felt that the religion of a being for whom twenty of the nobility were clamouring was no concern of mine, and I was surprised when she asked me to leave my address. So little did I aspire to the paragon that I did not even ask if she could cook. I passed ladies still arriving, and I was so melancholy that I went home in a 'bus.

"The next morning I had a letter, and I can truly say I never was so flattered in my life, not even when He asked me to marry him, for the paragon had chosen me out of one hundred and sixty-five ladies, exclusive of twenty of the nobility.

"To be sure, she went against all my principles and I did not even know if she could cook; but she had chosen me!

"So she arrived in company of three cardboard bonnet-boxes and a japanned tin trunk.

"He suggested that we should try her on a lunch, and we did. Thank goodness, we only had four of his chums, or I should 80

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have died of mortification. After all, a clever man is sometimes duller than the dullest woman.

*'How she cooked! It was appalHng! Our parlour-maid, who has lovely manners, served a series of horrors as if they vv^ere a feast for the gods. After luncheon I found cook had broken my best cut-glass salad bowl, and two old Worcester plates, and then finished off^ with nervous prostration on the kitchen floor. He and I dined out that night; we had had too much of the comforts of home.

**The next morning the housemaid ap- peared with joy in her usually blank eyes, and said cook had gone and taken her boxes. At first I thought she had gone to High Mass. But no, she had really gone with her heavy tin trunk and the three band- boxes. How she got them down at mid- night over four creaking flights of stairs without being heard, we shall never know, but she did. We found out afterwards that the Honourable Mrs. Smith had had this paragon just one month, and then she was anxious to get rid of her in a hurry; so she advertised. It was cruel, wasn't it ? 8i

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Really, you know, it is wicked of you to complain when a servant has been faithful to you for twenty-six years/*

My friend, who had been made cynical through suffering, said her cook wouldn't have been faithful if she could have got a better place.

The servant problem is indeed a very sore subject and singularly serious in England. For this there are two reasons: class distinc- tions, and also because so many more ser- vants are needed here to do a given amount of work than anywhere else. Of course, a great leisured class means also a great serv- ing class, and this serving class is useless for others, because it has been brought up to false standards of expenditure and to a good deal of idleness. Take this class out of the supply, and also the ever-increasing numbers to whom the smattering of Board School education has taught just enough to make them good for very little, so that in their proper pride they prefer to pass the weary years in cheap department stores or starve on factory wages. Then it is very conceivable that the servant supply does not equal the demand.

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The result is that the registry offices do a thriving trade in sending out all sorts of undesirable and ignorant human beings to be thorns in the flesh of unsuspecting house- keepers.

There is something so pathetically reck- less in our everyday life! How little we know of the servants we take into our inti- mate lives out of this terrible London with its vices and crimes, discovered and undis- covered. Recommendations are simply the blind leading the blind. The worst servant I ever had came with a glowing personal character.

Why will not women tell the truth ! Per- haps it is characteristic of the weaker vessel to be more tactful, to put it delicately, than men. The lack of truth is partly a desire not to be bothered and partly a rather spite- ful wish that the other woman may find out for herself, and also a cowardly fear to do a poor girl an ill turn. I rejoice to say that I found one honest woman who prevented my taking a burglar's assistant to my heart. But she was more than a woman, for she was also a physician. When a woman takes to a man's profession she at the same

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time takes on something of a man's vir- tues.

To this lady I went for a personal char- acter of an ideal housemaid, who said she had left her last place because the lady would not permit a "follower." Thinking I might not be so bigoted in regard to fol- lowers, human nature being human nature, I was prepared for an area romance, but not for a shilling shocker.

The ideal, so the lady told me honestly, was beloved by a job butler next door. She had been a nice country girl, but London and the job butler had proved her destruc- tion. Area railings and bolts were as nothing to them. The area bell was for ever ringing, and when, by highest command, it remained unanswered, then did the job butler make a constant practice of ringing the front-door bell at unearthly hours, until finally the police had to interfere. Then, soured by the course of true love running so far from smooth, the job butler broke in one night and took things. Whether the loving house-maid was a party to the burglary was not proved, but she was discharged at a moment's notice, and it was then that she applied to me. 84

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"I couldn't let you take her with eyes closed," said this true philanthropist, and so I declined the young burglar's assistant.

In another article I have compared Eng- lish and American servants. Briefly re- peated, the American servant will do twice the work of an English servant, nor are her rules cast-iron. She is open to reason, accepts new methods, and is not conserva- tive. Conservatism, to a certain point, wherever found, represents a caution that is wisdom; but the conservatism of ser- vants rests on colossal ignorance, the result of experience gathered from innumerable *' ladies," many quite as ignorant as their servants. In these progressive days they keep them too short a time to care to teach them anything, and are mostly glad enough to ** muddle along" any way. Never have servants been treated so well as now and never have they as a rule been so bad.

The world, in spite of its Rockefellers, Carnegies, and Rothschilds, is made up of people with modest incomes, and it is these who suffer most keenly under the mistaken aspiration of the servant class. The impos- sibility of getting servants, makes them

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resigned to put up with unbearable short- comings, for complaints result in immediate notice being given, and, after all, a bad servant is better than no servant. So the servant never learns, and takes her faults to the next sufferer.

The head of one of the most trustworthy of the London registry offices told me that the decadence of servants had its rise during the first Jubilee of Queen Victoria. There was such an influx of strangers in London that country servants were imported at huge wages, while, on the other hand, innumer- able London servants threw up their situa- tions simply "to see the fun." Since then, she affirmed, they have become a restless lot, changing from one place to the other without reason, except for the sake of excite- ment, and generally demanding big estab- Hshments, less work, and increasing wages. I have heard more complaints of servants in England in a few years than in my whole Hfe in America.

The country servants' Mecca is London,

and no sooner have they reached it than

they join that restless procession with the

japanned tin trunks. What becomes of

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them ? Where do they finally go with their false standards and blank faces! Those awful blank faces, as impenetrable as that of the Egyptian Sphinx.

Servants can be divided into two classes: those that aspire to serve the nobility, and the others who circulate among the middle- classes. The outward and visible distinc- tions of the former are the perfection of menial smartness, the women's starched apron-bows cocked to an impertinent angle, and their faces a blank. On the other hand, the middle-class servant never really suc- ceeds to a blank face, which is the result of years of practice, and sometimes she even smiles. Also her apron is often put on in a hurry, and much starch brazens out holes; besides, her face invites "smuts."

Then there is a kind of manservant who revolves in boarding-houses and among certain kinds of distracted families, who is too awful to contemplate. Those fatal, ill-fitting evening clothes that shine with age and grease. He mostly comes from foreign parts, and, instead of presenting to the spectator a blank wall of a face, he stares at you in agonised misapprehension. As a

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foreigner, he is naturally despised by his British fellow servants. Has not the Eng- lishman a perfectly natural conviction that Divine Providence is a British institution, and that the heavenly language is Eng- lish?

The rest of the v^orld (v^ith the exception in these days of Americans) he labels as foreigners, and foreigners he either tolerates, overlooks, or despises. His main attitude is one of amiable indifference, which is, indeed, his little weakness, for it blinds him to the possible strength of what he does not consider worth guarding against. I asked a distinguished Englishman if he often went abroad. "No," he said, quite without humour, "I hate meeting so many for- eigners."

It is this British attitude which so en- dears him to the world at large, already exasperated by a little way he has of appro- priating to himself nice, big slices of the earth. His enemies quite forget how he promptly turns these nice, big slices into civilised lands, which he throws open to the rest of the world. It is, possibly, as com- pensation, that the world turns over to him

Kitchen Comedies

its surplus hungry and idle population, who gather up English pennies with which they later on return to their various fatherlands, where they at once join the army of the bitter Anglophobes. And is not the dingy foreign servant one of the innumerable birds of prey that fill their poor, starved stomachs with English victuals ? No won- der the English are so unpopular!

The English servant requires to be studied. The world's other servants are mere ama- teurs, the EngUsh servant has a trade. As an American, I proceeded to treat mine a rJmericaine, and I made my first blunder. A sensible American is, if not friends with her servants, at least friendly. The Eng- lishwoman, if she is sensible, presents to her servants a surface of perfect indifference, and then she has peace, for the English servant despises a considerate and kindly mistress as not knowing her place.

The most difficult thing for a stranger to learn is that impalpable line between the different servants' duties. If one does not enumerate what one expects of them when they are hired, afterwards it is too late. They have, however, a rough sense of

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honour and they generally do what they agree to.

According to the very common American custom, our house is furnished with speak- ing-tubes, and these nearly lost me a very superior cook. She was so superior that I was more polite to her than to any other human being; only when I was quite sure she could not hear, then did I call her by her pet name. Lady Macbeth. As I was looking timidly through the larder one morn- ing she gave me notice. I never had a ser- vant who had such lovely kitchen manners; her unfailing impudence was veneered by the most perfect propriety. "It's the speak- ing-tubes; I've nothing else to complain of; but I won't be talked to through the tubes. It's against my dignity to have other ser- vants listen."

This time I pacified her, but later on I hurt her beyond forgiveness; I had sent the housemaid to call her one morning when she was very late. On my usual kitchen visit I found Lady Macbeth palpitating with rage — she, a "cook-housekeeper," called by the housemaid; she gave notice at once, and I realised then that there is no such 90

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snob as a servant, and there is nothing more unyielding than kitchen etiquette.

The terrors of etiquette below stairs! There once strayed into my employ a house- maid whose career, hitherto, had been con- fined to lodging-houses. Upstairs she al- ways looked frightened, and her face had a great attraction for "smuts"; but she was very willing and very incompetent. It is my experience that the willing are mostly incompetent. It was in the reign of Lady Macbeth, a tall, fair person, with blonde eyes and a cast-iron jaw.

"It is not for me to ask Madam to send Muggins away, but the rest of us will go if Muggins stays. I don't know where she has lived-out before, but she drinks out of her saucer and does not even know that we expect her to be down in our sitting-room at half-past four, dressed in her black, and ready to pour out the servants' tea." Of course, I gave Muggins notice, recognising that the lodging-house was her proper sphere, and in the month that followed I knew she suffered martyrdom. She used to wipe her eyes stealthily, and as she was not proud I showed her some sympathy. 91

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**They ain't nice to me downstairs like you are, Ma'am," she sobbed, "though I'm doing my best. Cook says she won't wipe up the dishes for the hkes of me."

"Never mind. Muggins; you'll be going soon and, after all, you have learnt a good deal here," I consoled her.

"I wish," said Muggins, "I was dead." Thus I discovered in Muggins an unex- pected and interesting note of tragedy, but she melted away as they all do; one does not remember them as individuals but as materialised qualities, good or bad. How- ever, some months after, I again encountered Muggins, looking like a bad imitation of a very middle-class young lady, in a huge hat like a cart-wheel, nodding with plumes, beside her an underdone youth, a bowler on the back of his head, so as to show the fine, bold sweep of his shiny black hair.

Muggins's smile showed that she had learnt a thing or two. Never more would she drink tea out of a saucer, nor plunge her knife into a mouth which, when we first met, was guiltless of front teeth. Now I at once recognised the gloss of six brand-new "store teeth." On the strength of what 92

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she had learnt in my service she had gradu- ated to higher spheres, where she could afford the luxury of a young man with whom to "walk out." It seems a servant's aim and ambition is to set up a young man with whom she walks out — the final goal being rarely matrimony; it only means speechless strolls through Regent's Park or Kensington Gardens, or the joyous revels at Earl's Court, if "she" stands treat.

Oddly enough, the English lover of the lower class is always speechless but very affectionate in public. The American of the same class is publicly prudish. It is, therefore, rather startling, as a blushing stranger, to see the loving couples that emerge out of the leafy paths of Kensington Gar- dens, clasping each other's waists, holding hands, or engaged in other miscellaneous fondling, which is probably the safety- valve that nature provides for those whose general and business expression is a total blank.

In the course of time, Muggins was suc- ceeded by Jane; Jane of the Madonna face, a voice like a summer breeze, and her work divine. I basked in unaccustomed joy

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until, unfortunately, one morning I asked her to send off an important telegram for me. "No," she said, in her sweet voice, "I won't go out this filthy morning." In the afternoon I so far regained my scattered senses as to call up Jane and give her notice. For an instant she turned white, then she recovered herself.

"I beg your pardon. Madam," she said, with respectful effrontery, "I shall not take your notice. Servants do not need to take any notice after noon."

"All the same you have had your notice; but I will, if you wish, repeat it to-morrow morning," I said, rather amused.

The next morning I had barely set my foot in the dining-room when Jane flew in, "I wish to give you notice. Ma'am," she cried, in a gasp. I recognised that I was defeated, for by some menial code of honour she felt that she could tell her next lady that she had given me notice. Whether the custom is legal or not, registry offices are not agreed, but I am now careful to give notice before noon.

The restlessness of the English servants, fanned by the Board Schools and higher 94

Kitchen Comedies

aspirations towards department stores, has produced the temporary servant. She flits from one distressed family to the other, and is at anyone's beck and call at a mo- ment's notice; nor does she harrow her lady's feelings by staying that awful last month, when having done her worst she is invul- nerable.

She has, of course, her disadvantages, along with her advantages. She takes naturally no earthly interest in her place (but none of them do!) for she flits Uke a grubby butterfly from one area to the other; she is, however, usually quite competent. Her example, on the other hand, is bad, for she gets high wages, a varied existence, and plenty of holidays, and, being temporary and independent, she does not work too hard.

There is really nothing so fatal as aspira- tions in the wrong place; to them we owe the servant problem. Now, the average man will sniffs at the servant problem and, unless he has a great, broad mind, he will say to the partner of some of his joys and all of his sorrows, "You don't know how to treat your servants. My clerks don't bother me."

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As if that were the same thing at all! Men's places are easily filled, and the aver- age man is so anchored by domestic ties that he thinks several times before he gives Yearn- ing, as indeed would a servant if she had a family depending on her earnings. But a servant usually has no ties. Her clothes are in her tin trunk, and her hopes in the registry office; thus, accompanied by the one and protected by the other, she goes on her winding way. If she had an idle or sick husband and half-a-dozen children to sup- port, her attitude towards service would be less lofty.

Coming often from very poor homes, it is a curious fact that servants are always extravagant, at any rate with other people's belongings. Lady Macbeth, under whose dominion I languished for over three years, once confessed to me that she prided herself on her economy, which, she said, proved her to be of a different class from other servants.

Once, in a gracious moment, she also

told me she preferred being a good cook

rather than a poor nursery governess who,

in the dehcate and unwritten code of service,

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Kitchen Comedies

is on a higher social scale, hovering, I believe on the outskirts of the lady pinnacle. She was kind enough to add that she would rather cook for some one she could look up to than teach a lot of stupid young ones. I was highly flattered, and so was the other member of my family, and we tried hard to live up to her good opinion. But no man is a hero to his valet, and she never repeated the compliment.

It is unfortunately true that domestic troubles, like rheumatism, toothache, and sea-sickness, from which one can suffer untold agonies, never arouse a proper sym- pathy. A man takes his business seriously enough, but he never takes his wife's house- keeping seriously.

**What in the world do you do all day long ?" is his kindly, scornful cry; as if there were nothing to do! Yet it is that which gives women grey hairs and nervous pros- tration, and forms an endless topic of con- versation among those who would gladly avoid the subject. It requires cast-iron, steel-bound nerves to confront rebellion in the kitchen, simply because of the terror of going from bad to worse. That awful

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pilgrimage to the registry office, those hide- ous interviews, that terrible month of pro- bation — your probation as well as hers. I defy two women to get together and not talk "servants" before the end of the con- versation. Not even intellect will save you the flight to that inferno, the Registry Office.

There is one figure the dramatist of the future will never again be able to employ, and that is the ancient retainer. Never again will he follow his unfortunate master and mistress into exile, or lay down his life for them, or give up to them his humble earnings. Not only will the species be ex- tinct, but the very tradition of it will have passed away.

The twenty-first century baby is destined to be rocked and cradled by electricity, warmed and coddled by electricity, perhaps fathered and mothered by electricity. Prob- ably the only thing he will be left to do unaided will be to make love; and yet, pos- sibly, that also is another form of electricity. At any rate, the ancient retainer is doomed, and it is the ancient retainer's fault. He has shown his decreasing interest in the 98

Kitchen Comedies

family, so no wonder the family takes no further interest in him. Job servants supply his place, and in illness a trained nurse does as well, if not much better.

Alas, it is a materialistic, utilitarian age and, if they did but know it, neither master nor servant can afford to stifle what remains of loyalty and affection. There are some things for which money will not pay, strange though it may seem in these days when everything has its price. The life which cultivates no feeling but indifference is to be deplored both for master and man.

There is something which makes of labour a higher thing than a mere barter. If that something really existed, we would not have that ceaseless, perpetually changing proces- sion with tin trunks; personally, I should not feel so much that I was keeping a board- ing-house for strangers, whom I pay instead of their paying me. If any of the old spirit were still left, servants would not be sent adrift to shift for themselves when their best days are over, and we should still see that phenomenon, an old servant.

What becomes of old servants ^. It is a mystery. Some possibly become meek, and

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keep lodging-houses; others, meeker still, become caretakers. Can human imagina- tion conjure up a more dismal fate ? To be the companion of beetles and mice; to vegetate in a basement, gloomy with the abysmal gloom of London, and silent with the monumental silence of a deserted house!

Why not think of the possible future, that giddy, independent day, when to give notice, and feast on the consequent anguish, is a cool rapture ? Once only I met an ex- parlour maid who rose superior to fate. She had become useful by the day. Then, un- expectedly, a subtle change came over her — she also aspired. She couldn't give warn- ing, which would have been her natural out- let, but she felt that she owed something to her dignity before the other servants. From henceforth, she announced, she would really have to come in by the front door. I sub- mitted, and the area steps know her no more.

It is a comfort not to be required to solve the problems of a future generation. I saw, however, yesterday, the thin end of the wedge in the form of a little red cart, in front of a house before which the usual *' Sidewalk Committee," as they call it in

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America, was gathered, lazily critical. Rub- ber tubes led from the cart into the open windows of a room, and a gentleman, appar- ently of elegant leisure, in uniform, super- intended proceedings. For a moment I suspected fire, but seeing the calm, unruffled, unsoiled, unwatered appearance of every- thing, it suddenly flashed through my mind that what I so often had predicted was being fulfilled. Science was solving the domestic problem!

If we can clean a house by air, without the presence of a servant, before long some great man will teach us to cook in the same way. Some day electricity will release us from bondage. A cook will then be as unneces- sary as a 'bus horse. Then let the young person, who now aspires to the factory and the department stores, threaten; we shall not care. Indeed, then may come our sweet time of revenge, for the department stores will be undoubtedly overcrowded, and the young person with the yellow tin trunk will then join a different procession in the days of that happy millennium.

Gladly would I have shaken hands with the gentleman who was superintending the

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red cart, as the outward and visible promise of a new liberty, but I feared he might not understand.

If one might offer a suggestion to our great and glorious Republic across the sea in regard to any possible change in her coinage, it would be that, rather than the worthy lady with the Phrygian cap, it should bear the figure of the new ''vacuum- cleaner," with its attendant Man; that represents something real, something up- to-date. The lady with the cap and stars is a myth, but what have we poor sufferers to do with myths? Let us, rather, give credit where credit is due.

The other day there was sent to me a voluminous list of the eminent scientists who are to lecture before the Royal Institution. As I read their famous names it did seem to me that if these giants of science would abstract their gaze from discovering new planets, new continents, new gases, and new rays, and would bring their mighty intellects to bear on what might be called kitchen science, the results would be incalculable.

Does not the old nursery wisdom declare, "Great oaks from little acorns grow?"

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Kitchen Comedies

Invent an electrical cook, an electrical parlour-maid, an electrical housemaid, and an electrical boy for the boots. Think of the peace that will enter our homes; think of the just retribution that will overtake those awful offices that pocket our fees and supply worse than nothing! Think of the joy of millions of crushed housekeepers who, for the first time in the history of the world, will be able to look a cook squarely in the face and give her warning! Surely that is an aim which should satisfy the greatest intellect, because the greatest intellect (presumably a man, a brother, a father, or a husband) demands to be fed, not only often, but well.

Columbus was undoubtedly a great man, and the product of his time; was he not the first to do that little tgg trick, and did he not afterwards discover the United States of America .? But his fame, mighty and enduring though it is, will pale before his, the product of our time, the product of our dire necessity, who will give to the world what is greater even than a new continent — and that is Peace.

The greatest man of the future will be the Columbus of the Kitchen. 103

Entertaining

I ONCE met an Englishman in America who quite unconsciously explained to me the vital difference between Eng- lish and American society. He was so quiet, so gentlemanly, and so bored, and I had tried my best to say things. At last I cried in despair, "You English- men are so hard to entertain!" To which he replied, in slow surprise, "But we don't want to be entertained!" and that is it! And as man moulds the woman, and the woman makes society — therefore the Eng- lish woman makes the society of which her Englishman approves, just as the American makes a society suitable for her "men folks."

Society is an elusive expression, and the human beings who constitute it are spread out in layers like the chocolate cake of our childhood, and every layer aspires to be the top one with the sugar frosting. In a king- dom the only ones who ever reach that sugar- coated eminence are of course the august 104

Entertaining

reigning family besides a very precious and select few, who must be horribly bored at having reached an altitude where there is no need of further aspiration. After all, it does add a zest to life to triumph over one's dearest friends and snub them. Of course a reigning family has the superlative privi- lege of snubbing, but they have to take it out in that, for to them is denied the joy of "climbing."

In America we are still in the beginning of things, and society is less complex, though more so than formerly, as the unfortunate result of increasing wealth. There was a golden age in America, when different cities each required of its votaries different quali- fications to enable them to enter what is called "Society." In those days, it is pleas- ant to testify, it was what a man had done, intellectually or morally, that opened to him the iron-bound gates of Boston. You might be shabby and poor, and rattle up to So- ciety in an exceedingly inelegant vehicle called a "herdic" (which shot you out Uke coal), but you were welcome if you were literary or scientific, musician or philan- thropist. Money looked on respectfully at

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the great and shabby, and was distinctly elbowed into a corner.

Something grips at my heart as I recall those bygone days when, as a very young girl, with a bump of reverence as high as the Himalayas, I sat in the corner of a splendid, shabby Boston drawing-room, and watched the great men and women, whose genius has left its imprint on American his- tory and Uterature. They talked to each other, like ordinary human beings, and re- freshed themselves with cold coffee and heavy cake, which was passed by such of the younger generation as the wonderful hostess could press into service. It is re- membering this wonderful hostess that I am impressed by the truth that entertain- ing is not a fine art, but genius; it is not acquired, it is inborn.

In this shabby old mansion, with its relics of a bygone splendour, I saw for the first time the greatest hostess it has ever been my good fortune to meet. She was neither beautiful, witty, nor young, but she had the subtle quality which made you at once at home in her genial presence; which made you feel that you were the one

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guest in whom she was interested, and this impression she made on everybody. Such was her magnetism that her spirit inspired every one, at least for the time being; a charming intercourse was the result, a geniahty among her guests who, the very next day, in an overwhelming flood of shy- ness, would cut each other dead.

I have come to the conclusion that it is this abominable shyness which makes human beings so repellent to each other. It is one of the minor martyrdoms of existence resulting in an antagonistic attitude, not so much because one doubts the eligibility of the other, but rather that one doubts one's self. The agony of self-consciousness that surrounds one as with a thin coating of ice, out of which frosty prison one breathes ice. Did the other but know what one suffers!

It is often very difficult to distinguish between shyness and reserve, for one can be reserved without being shy, and one can be shy and in an excess of shyness fright- fully unreserved. Though the English are rightly credited with having brought re- serve and self-control — those characteristics 107

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of the highest civilization as well as the lowest — to the greatest mastery, yet some of their amazing silence and immobility I believe to be shyness. It is a comfort to think so because, when one's vivacious dis- position occasionally hurls one against an icy obstacle, it pains.

The English self-control — the result of generations of self-controlled ancestors — makes heroes in the battlefield, but some- times it also makes of its bravest officers but foolhardy leaders of men. On the other hand, the national pride to suppress emotion retaliates on nature in a perfectly legitimate way; the emotion one suppresses, like all unused functions, ends by weakening, then disappearing. Not that the English are without emotion, but compared to other nationalities, the average Englishman's emo- tions are not easily stirred. Self-control is a very inspiring quality, but it is not so wonderful when the nature exercising it is tuned to a low key. English supremacy is so great that English self-control, is the fashion, but while an Englishman's self- control is the icy covering to a quiet, placid mountain; the control a Frenchman or an io8

E ntertaini ng

Italian assumes is the ice veneering a volcano.

Human nature is, to a certain extent, everywhere the same, and its simple and primal virtues ai:e the same, only modified by race and climate. A man may be panic- stricken in disaster, not through cowardice, but because of uncontrolled imagination. No one will deny the superlative bravery of the French, but it is equally impossible to deny that in panics they sometimes lose their heads. In such circumstances the Frenchman does not show to the same ad- vantage as the Englishman, not because of a lack of bravery, but because he possesses a fiery imagination. A Frenchman sees not only the present disaster, but he sees the results far into the dim future; the English- man, with controlled imagination, if any, applies himself to a hurried view of the situation, and wastes no time on a thought of the future.

I knew an American of English descent who found himself in a burning German theatre one night. In the instant there was a panic, and a frantic woman clung to his arms and implored him to save her. 109

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He was very near-sighted, and in the con- fusion his eyeglasses had fallen off. "I certainly will," he said, reassuringly, *'if you will just let me put on my glasses." Then he climbed upon the seat, calmly gauged a possible chance of escape, and rescued his companion and himself. Yet the imagination which in certain circum- stances results in disaster, under others gives a man a charm which makes his compan- ionship a delight.

We Americans are a composite race; we have the coolness of the English, as well as the nervous tension of multiples of races, exaggerated by that glowing air, which has been wittily called "free champagne." The warring of these various elements promises results that cannot be foreseen in a nation which boasts of being Anglo-Saxon, what- ever that may mean.

Years ago I remember the wrecking of a little pleasure boat near a famous island on the coast of Maine, and with what hero- ism the young men of the party saved them- selves; that is where the foreign element brought with it a too active imagination. Now the atmosphere and the foreign ele-

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ment in our blood make us a nervous, high- strung people, aggressively entertaining, and clamouring to be entertained.

In no way has the American invasion proved more triumphant than in the subtle change it is producing in the new genera- tion of English girls. The English woman, Hke the clever antagonist she is, studies the skilful weapons with which the other has established her captivating supremacy, and is proceeding to use the same.

The new English girl has a charm and a vivacity, when she is not hampered by tra- dition, which must make the American girl look to her laurels. It will, of course, take her some time to let her spirit sparkle be- hind those statuesque features; still, she is undoubtedly on the road to vivacity. But the unbending and expressionless matron and immovable and monosyllabic young girl are still to the fore. A wintry smile on the matron's lips, enough to chill the most cordial guest, and the strangled remarks of the young girl and her slow, cold eyes, are the triumphant results of the nation of the self-controlled. Those cold eyes and that slow smile that have in them not the ghost III

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of humour. To get behind the eyes and the smile, to discover some inward fire! Is there any ? One looks with envy at those faces which, from the lowest up, possess that in common that it is impossible to penetrate into the real self.

It must be confessed that what might be called the national manner is not conducive to geniality of intercourse.

The power a hostess has to blight a crowd of people with her own frost! There is the hostess who greets you as if she had never seen you before, and accepts your hand as if it were a slice of cold fish; there is the haughty hostess who shakes hands limply while she looks over your head at a superior guest; there is the vague hostess who smiles liberally, but sees you not; then there is the hostess with the surface geniality, who, with a hurried glance at you, gushes inquiries across you at the nearest man. There are as many varieties of hostesses as there are women, and they one and all drop you, and you merge into the army of starers, sometimes saved by an introduction to some other shipwrecked mariner with whom you escape to the tea-room.

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The American fashion of dispensing afternoon tea is very pretty, and should be introduced here. Instead of leaving the serving of light tefreshments to the ser- vants, the American hostess chooses several of the prettiest girls she knows, and gives them the task of pouring out the tea, coffee, and chocolate at a centre table decorated with flowers, lighted candles, and all that coquettish art of which the American woman is past-mistress. The table should accom- modate four girls, who, in their smartest party toilettes, are at once ornamental and useful, and the centre of attraction. They take away something of the stiffness which is inevitable among a crowd of people, many of whom are strangers to each other. Hav- ing to ask for a cup of tea from a pretty girl instead of a servant is pleasant, and gen- erally leads to conversation, and it is con- sidered the greatest compliment a hostess can confer if she asks you to "pour" for her. The more original the hostess, the more charming can she make her "teas," and what is usually a rather dreary function may be made entertaining and graceful.

The English hostess, ignoring her pretty

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chance, leaves the tea-table, if there are many guests, to her servants. I once in- vited an English girl to '*pour" tea for me, and she discomfited me exceedingly by asking why I did not get the servants to do it! And I had meant to pay her a compliment!

What a social comfort a hat is! It gives one so much moral courage. It is less terrible to encounter society in a hat; one can take refuge in it from the coldest blast. But in the evening, garlanded with roses and deserted, so to speak, by God and man, society is a trial.

There is no greater matryrdom for the middle-aged than baring their shoulders to the bitter air and transporting them to an evening function. To shiver for an instant in the smile of the hostess, and then sub- side against the wall, while the young and ardent flirt about with members of the other sex; or if they don't flirt, they appear to, which is just as well. A very beautiful woman once confessed to me in a moment of sincerity that she would be ashamed to be seen talking to another woman at an evening party. "I would rather be with 114

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the most idiotic man, and look as if I were flirting hard, than talk to the most brilliant woman in the room. I always avoid women at parties."

It is not an age for conversation; our small-talk is soon exhausted, and for a woman to talk at length, labels her as a rock to be avoided. How can we have salons^ we who cannot converse ? We are the products of the daily papers, and our conversation is like their familiar small- talk column. So we have to have artificial aids to entertaining.

We are recited to, sung to, played to, and there being nothing so "cussed" as human nature, no sooner are we played to and re- cited to than our "cussedness" will out, and we are seized with a wild longing to talk, and talk we do at the top of our voices. Universal resentment is expressed towards the blameless arts that temporarily check our interchange of what it would be flattery to call ideas, but, in my own experience, when some stray man and I have stood to- gether speechless, no sooner did the piano break into our appalling silence than ideas seemed to inundate us. The dumb man

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spoke as if by magic, and I, who hitherto had nothing to say, couldn't talk fast enough.

The divine arts are too good to be wasted in a twentieth century drawing-room! Such conversation as there is, is amply accom- panied by the pianola and the gramophone. These two awful inventions are to music what the chromo is to painting. They make music as vulgar as machine-made lace.

My first experience of the pianola was at the Universal Provider's. It was Christ- mas time, and I was so tired and harassed that I stood quite still in the surging crowd, oblivious of the sharp elbows of my shop- ping sisters, oblivious of dust and microbes, only conscious that I was dizzy with fatigue. Suddenly through the crowd I heard the familiar strains of the great romantic polo- naise of Chopin — the one introduced by the exquisite Andante Spianato, It is a mediaeval romance without words, of chiv- alry, tournaments, gallant cavaliers, and beautiful women; all this I heard in the piano department of the Universal Pro- vider.

I couldn't understand it! What great ii6

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artist could so far forget himself as to play this divine work for a passing, heedless, irritable crowd. I pushed my way past my sisters, and possibly used my elbows. As I came nearer I grew confused by something exasperatingly perfect in the sound. The humanity of a single false note was wanting. I reached the crowd about the piano — well, everybody has seen a pianola! An imita- tion artist (he had long fair hair) steered the music and pumped in the expression at the proper place, while the indefatigable instrument ejected miles of punctured paper.

Never did anything so get on my nerves! I nearly wept. It is, perhaps, needless to say that the pianola and other instruments of its kind are of American origin, and, like all American inventions, they are labour- saving. You can be a Paderewski while you wait, but, thank Heaven! no ingenious American has yet invented a mechanical Joachim!

The first modest invention, the grand- parent of the pianola, was exhibited in Boston (America) years and years ago, and was a modest httle box, with only a small 117

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appetite for punctured paper. One of the judges of the musical instruments at the exhibition showed me this curious music- box, to which, because of its ingenuity, they had decided to give a prize. Now the in- strument has waxed greater and greater, and no one is safe from it, no, not if you go to the farthest desert or highest moun- tain. It graces afternoon teas, while the guests refresh themselves in stunned silence, or shriek at the top of their voices in vain rivalry, until they melt into the street, where the turmoil of cabs, carts, vans, and motors is soothing and peaceful by comparison.

For a stranger to penetrate into typical English social circles is often a blighting experience. If the hostess is a woman of the world, she comes to your assistance; but if she is the woman of an island, you find yourself stranded, unintroduced, and sur- rounded by more or less handsome and statuesque creatures, who would possibly be delighted to talk to you if you were introduced — or possibly not.

Oh, the debatable question of introduc- tion! One sometimes thinks that in Eng- land people go into society just to avoid ii8

Entertaining

each other; at least so it would appear from the ardent way in which they decline to be introduced. Conventional smart English society does not introduce, and that sets the fashion.

Society knows too many people, and re- fuses to know more; and its young men, having at their command only two feet apiece, also refuse to be introduced, for they cannot extend the field of their activ- ities. The young man's toil consists largely in duty dances, for the only way he can pay a worried mother for a dinner-party is by dancing with her daughter, who still hangs fire. So his path is not always strewn with roses. Still his is easier than the "gal's," for he can decline to be introduced to her, and he does this often with the little ca- prices and insolence of a society belle.

"Do let me introduce you to my cousin," said a generous young soul to her partner, " she is such a nice ' gal.

"Please don't; I should have to dance with her, and I am full up," replied the youth, and so it is. Not that all girls are so generous, far from it. It is the exception when they overstep the bounds and introduce 119

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an attractive girl to a young man. The result is that society is made up of cHques, wheels within wheels, and the cliques keep rigidly to themselves, and the loveliest young creatures outside languish against the wall, and no one takes pity on them.

Many are the complicated stratagems to introduce the young girl into the "smart set" of English society, and if the commander- in-chief ("mother") is not blessed with the best steel-covered nerves, she had better not undertake it. The commander-in-chief, of course a rich and great lady, borrows a list of unknown young men from other hostesses and invites them to her ball. Presumably grateful youths pay for this entertainment by dancing with the '*gal," but not always.

After all, smart society is alike all over the world; like hotel cooking, it has no nationahty. So America is ceasing to in- troduce, but this repression is not universal yet. All do not yet languish under self- inflicted boredom. A perfect American hostess makes her guests known to each other if they are strangers, and though fashion may protest, this is after all the only way to make a crowd of mutually

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unknown people comfortable and not awk- ward. People, except those of great ease of manner, will not speak to each other un- less introduced, and to talk to some one with- out the faint guide-post of a name is not very interesting. You may be talking to a very dull stranger, and turn away bored, when, had you but known that he was a great and shining light, how interested you would have been, and how deftly you would have turned the conversation into the one channel the great one always loves — him- self.

Possibly Americans overdo the introduc- ing; they are rather apt to overdo every- thing; it is the fault of a high-strung, nervous temperament; but of two evils let me rather be torn away from an interesting conversation every few minutes by a viva- cious hostess, than be stranded in a corner looking blankly at my fellow man, for all the world as if I had strayed into a 'bus in a party gown. Blessed will the day be when the American invasion will temper English society with its own possibly rather effusive geniality.

The fundamental difference between the

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two nationalities is that Americans love strangers, and the English hate them. The Englishman looks with suspicion on any one he doesn't know, root and branch; the American loves him until he hears of some- thing to his disadvantage, or untill he gets tired of him — which happens.

The Englishman's aversion to strangers does not include the American, curiously enough. He does not call him a foreigner, and he likes him. He likes him partly be- cause he really can't help it, and partly out of policy, and he looks charitably at his curious and original ways just as a big dog watches the gambols of a frolicsome puppy. He always remembers that that puppy is his puppy, and that some day he will grow into a big dog of his own breed, and — well, he respects the breed.

Not that the American man is in England as popular as the American woman; he is not. The charming American woman is the product of generations of hard-work- ing fathers and husbands who have toiled for her, and toil for her, and the result is that in cultivation and attraction she has left her creator rather behind. When you

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add to this his strenuous habits of business life, in which *' devil take the hindmost" is the motto, and a very confident belief in his own ability, and his country's unmis- takable destiny to "whip the universe," it produces a rather aggressive personality. So he is not as popular as his charming women, because, also, he represents a prophecy which is not unlike a menace. Yet the big dog watches the gambols of the little dog with tolerant good-nature.

Another factor in favour of the American woman is that she can be charming on two continents — the Englishwoman still con- fines her eff^orts to one — and she can be charming in the language of the two great- est nations in the world. Is this not a magnificent opportunity for her social genius? Descended, usually, from all sorts of races, America makes her what she is, and then boastfully sends the perfected article across the water to the old countries to ally her- self with the best or the worst of their aris- tocracy. That it is rarely the case of King Cophetua and the beggar-maid one admits; but, after all, everything has its price in this world, and coronets come dear, except, 123

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of course, to that one privileged class — the ladies of the variety theatres.

In speaking of the American man's aggres- siveness, one does not wish to imply that the Englishman is not aggressive; far from it. There is no one so aggressive as an English- man, but the difference is that the American is boastfully aggressive, and the English- man quietly so, as one so sure of himself and his belongings that boasting is super- fluous; which makes him all the more aggravating. The summit and climax of this aggravation is that the Englishman does not know that he is aggressive, and even resents it in his beloved Americans, and never suspects that his own want of popularity may be due to that same cause.

Years ago it was the Englishman who was the spoilt darling of nations; now he is making way for the American. But his early prestige was immense — it is still great, but it is a tempered greatness.

In those days when he went to America to harvest dollars (he rarely went for any other reason), he was received with a rap- turous humility which was pathetic. We grovelled before him, we suffered his pe- 124

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culiar manners, which had they been our own we should sometimes have labelled as bad, as the eccentricities of a superior be- ing. We were flattered when our resem- blance to him was pointed out, and to increase it we created that particularly obnoxious type, the Anglicised American; for, like all imitations, it is the caricature of the most unpleasant features of a resem- blance.

In those days we took him to our hearts, to our homes, and to our clubs, and when sometimes we came to London to enjoy his return civilities, we had to be satisfied with very modest crumbs of entertainment in- deed. But perhaps the Englishman said, in the subtle French tongue, ^^Je paye de ma personne." That explains it.

We spoiled the errant Englishman most abominably; our idol got bad manners and a swelled head, and it always took him some time on his return to a nation that, after all, consists of Englishmen, to find his level again. The wife of a very distinguished man complained to me of the demoralised condition in which her husband — who had gone to America to lecture — had been sent 125

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back to her. *'It will take me years to unspoil him," she cried. "It's all the fault of your women, who flatter them to death! And that is the reason," she added, with some bitterness, ''that Englishmen think they are so charming and clever."

Now that the Englishman has ceased to be so rare a bird in America, we receive him with less tumultuous rejoicing, and yet we still spoil him if he is distinguished or has a title. As for money, it is no object to us as credentials — we leave that to the English. A title .? Oh, yes, we love a title! Why shouldn't we .? Does not the English- man, according to Thackeray, love a lord ? With all it represents of tradition, romance, and history, is it a more ignoble passion for the snob than the worship of dollars, or more fatal to republican principles ?

The American money-kings are as surely creating a class apart as ever did the Eng- lish possessors of titles, and there is no greater nobility in a duke, by the grace of a gamble on the stock exchange, than a duke by the grace of tradition or history. Both may be represented by very poor creatures, but the duke of history has, at all events, 126

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the traditions of his ancestry to excuse the interest he still excites.

Occasionally one hears of an aspiring American, who, captivated by the poetry of sound, buys himself a title, and ornaments his republican breast with decorations — the fitting reward of dollars and cents; but such a one has lost, if not his country, at least his sense of humour.

Still, it is not our republican money-dukes who will make or mar our nation; its sta- bility rests on something nobler. Nor will it turn a great republic finally into a king- dom that we like titles as a child an unaccus- tomed toy. Is it not dinned into our ears that we are rich, and that the best is not too good for us ? Is not the best in the world for us .?

*'The finest jewels are kept for the American market," a famous jeweller once told me. Are not the very best imitations of the old masters sold to us? We are willing to pay, and money in this world can buy everything except just one trifle — con- tentment. Apart from contentment, money buys everything. It is a credential for virtue and a good name. A miUionaire must be 127

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good, or Divine Providence would not so have prospered him, and for this all-sufficient reason London takes him to its innocent and gushing heart. Of course sometimes the millionaire is not a real millionaire, but no one knows until he is found out; but the next best thing to being a real, honourable millionaire, is to have unlimited credit. Blessed is the man who has credit, for some day he may promote a company that will enable him to pay his bills.

Yes, America is being rewarded for all the entertainments she has lavished on by- gone Englishmen. She cannot these days complain of a lack of English hospitality. Columbia has a "real good time," and she drops the almighty dollar as she goes on her triumphant way, to the rapture of the English shopkeeper.

She worships English history, English titles, and English cathedrals. She gushes over all things great and good, and often she props up a rickety aristocrat with the splen- did strength of her great gold dollars, and not the stiffest British matron dares sniff at her. She will introduce and she will enter- tain, and she will be entertaining. She is 128

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often beautiful, and generally clever, — even if frothily clever.

Of all the American invasion she is the most subtly dangerous. You may keep off the American men with your fleets, and all the terrors of your newest million pounders, but how defend yourself from the American girl, who borrows a bow and arrow from a naughty little boy lightly dressed in two wings and a blush, and shoots right into your — heart!

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IT was in the "tuppeny tube" that the idea first came to me. I was filing out of the long car as expeditiously as I could, considering that I had to dis- entangle my feet from the heels of my fellow man, when a stern being in the brass buttons of authority gave me an unnecessary push, remarking briefly, "Hurry up!" Before I could wither him with a glance, the red light at the back of the train was winking jocosely at me, so there was nothing left to do but to follow my fellow sufferers, swallow my resentment along with the bad air, and proceed to soar upward.

Having recovered my mental balance I began to laugh. The awful majesty of temporary power, from a protoplasm up! It is indeed a curious fact that the world is not so much governed by its ruling classes as by the lower ones, who exercise their tem- porary tyranny — in whatever capacity it be — with a colossal arrogance that leaves the arrogance of a higher sphere leagues 130

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behind. Who has not seen great ladies, majestic beings in their own drawing-rooms, wait patiently before a counter while the young ''saleslady" finished an interesting conversation with a colleague in imitation diamonds. Possibly in private life the young "saleslady" was not at all proud; but place her behind a counter, and it gives her a moral support that makes her rise superior to the aristocracy and crush the middle classes.

Never shall I forget the pathetic sight of a distinguished general — one who fought and won a battle in the American Civil War, that decided the fortunes of the North — buying a pair of kid gloves from a superior young person in a glove store. He waited a long time very patiently while she exchanged a light badinage with an idle youth, splendid in the tallest kind of a collar.

"If you please," the general ventured, seeing the talk was not of business. The haughtiness with which she turned on him! "What do you want ?"

She leaned on the counter with both hands in that most delightfully engaging and characteristic of shop attitudes. No,

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there was no badinage for the poor general, and as he had no taste and no ideas, she sold him the most dreadful yellow gloves, with which he was burdened when we met at the door. He showed them to me rather piteously.

''They don't look right, somehow," he sighed. "Why don't you change them?" I urged. " Because," the great man whis- pered, whose courage was famous in the land, "because I'm afraid of her."

Oh, the terrible tyranny of the shopgirls, or, rather, as we live in a democratic age and one is as good as the other, the shop young ladies. When one of them waits on me, or, to be quite exact, when I grovel to her, and she is very short and snappish and uninterested, I wonder what can be the kind of superior being to whom she, so to speak, bends the knee ? Sometimes I think it must be the shopwalker, a great man, but human, except perhaps at Christmas time, but then I suspect he also may be afraid of her.

When she cries "sign" at the top of her penetrating voice, and I am ignominiously proved to have bought nothing, I reaUse that 132

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I am disgraced, and can hardly bear the united glances of the young lady's scornful eye, and the milder but still reproachful glance of the shopwalker. He catechises me firmly for reasons why I don't buy, and offers me instead everything under the sun that I don't want. If my soul ever pre- sumes to rebel it is when the young lady, not having what I am in search of, kindly advises me as to what I really do want — but even the traditional worm has been known to turn.

There is a dehcate difference between the English and the American young sales- lady. The American, being the daughter of the free, and distinctly of the independ- ent, and having the chance of being the future wife, mother or mother-in-law of presidents, does not demean herself to be on a sympathetic footing with the public. If the public wishes to buy, she is willing to sell, but is perfectly indifferent. Look wistfully into the American saleslady's per- fectly cold eye, if you are a wobbly lady and want some one to make up your mind for you, and you are met by a wall of the bleakest ice; nor does she thaw when you

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have bought for a large amount. She calls *'kish" in a shrill, unmoved voice, which summons a small boy or girl, who bears your money to the counting-house. There- upon she looks indifferently over your head while you wait for the change, and you feel that in spite of everything you have failed to please her.

The resuh of this admirable attitude of indifference is that America is the paradise of "shoppers," ladies who have no inten- tion whatever of buying, but who do love to see new things. It lies really between you and your conscience how many bales of goods you have unpacked without the re- motest idea of purchasing anything. If at the end you m.ake a few disparaging remarks and retire from the scene, the saleslady replaces the goods, perfectly in- different as to your having bought noth- ing.

The English shopgirl, on the other hand, makes it a personal affront if you do not buy; but there is excuse for her often enough, for in some shops, unfortunately, it is the cruel regulation that if she misses a certain number of sales she is discharged. Whether 134

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it pays to scare the saleslady into terrorising her customers to death is a question; per- sonally, I avoid such shops; I cannot be lured tvvice into buying what I don't want because of the frown of the young lady. Nor does it even soothe my ruffled feelings when the shopwalker thanks me profusely as he countersigns the bill.

Shopkeepers should be very particular as to their young saleslady's nose; the very superior kind just crushes the public. Eng- land is a proof that it is not the eye that is born to command, but the stately Roman nose. It has given the world quite a wrong idea of Englishmen, who have gone on their triumphant way in the wake of that majestic feature, to the alarm and respect of the rest of the world. Had it been less aggres- sive, the world might possibly now fear England less and love her more. Yet such trivialities make history.

If you have a good conscience, the only wielder of temporary power who appears mighty and yet mild is the policeman. To the bad conscience he represents more the solid terrors of the law than the Lord Chief Justice himself. He is the only creature

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from whom familiarity never takes away any of his terrors.

We once had an old cook who put it in a nutshell. "Happy is he who can look a policeman in the face," she declared. The wisdom of it! After all, is not half the world running away from retributive justice ? Think, then, of the blessing of a legaHsed conscience. To be at peace with the policeman! Think of the rapture of envy a poor, hunted-down burglar must feel as he sees an ordinary citizen pass that awful being in a helmet without a quake.

I take this opportunity of offering to the great and pohte one my little tribute of gratitude in the name of all the spinsters, widows, nursemaids, and puppy dogs who cross the street in the security of his out- stretched hand. And of all maiden ladies, English and American, who seek his advice and ask him perplexing questions, which he alone can answer, for he is admittedly a combination of the street directory, the dictionary, and the "Encyclopaedia Britan- nica" up-to-date. I have often wondered if he ever unbends ? Does he ever take off 136

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his boots and his helmet, or does he sleep in them ? Does he ever sit down ? It must be a great joy and pride to be his wife, to be, as it were, on such friendly terms with the traffic. I am sure that, if she loves him, she asks him no questions.

Here, I really must digress just enough to say that until women can be policemen, and can stand like magnificent statues in the turmoil of vehicles and direct the tumult with one finger — without a moment's con- fusion — not until then will I believe that they have been chosen by destiny to do man's work. Bless the policeman! May his wages be raised — he deserves it!

The temporary power of a cabman is often concentrated in a moment of intense anguish for his fare when, if a four-wheeler, he rolls off his box, stares at the money dropped into a very dirty paw, makes a speech which ranges from reproach to vitu- peration, and follows you until a benefi- cent front door closes on your anguish. He has it in his power to take the bloom from the smartest toilette.

There is no one in the whole range of civiUsation who has such a power to inflict

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humiliation on one as a cabman! He has that dehcate perception that he knows just when his remarks will cut like a lash. He always grumbles on principle, and you would rather give him your whole fortune than have him make a spectacle of you before those other temporaries, the footmen. As if he didn't know it, and as if he didn't always choose the noblest of these as wit- nesses! You know that you have overpaid him, and so does he, but he follows you with running remarks, in the form of a soliloquy, which increase in virulence as you flee before him, and which produce that peculiar contortion of face in the well-bred footman, in which a grin battles with a countenance of stone.

Those awful footmen! I do believe that a cabby, in spite of his bad language, is sometimes the prey of softer em.otions. One knows by observation that he often smokes a pipe, and from the way his chariot leans up against the pavement of the nearest saloon, out of which he comes with a frightfully red face and smacking his hps, one knows he is not a '* bigoted" total abstainer. One even pictures him as re- 138

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tired to a mews, and in that peaceful retreat, with the family washing flapping over his head, enjoying respite from timid fares in the bosom of his family.

There is a monumental prejudice against four-wheelers. It is even growing. Once I used to frolic about in them, flitting from one afternoon tea to the other; now when I ask for one it is, if possible, secretly, and always apologetically. Why is it ? They cost nearly the same as hansoms, but why are they so plebeian ? Even a 'bus is not so low. Servants respect you more even if they know that you get into a 'bus out of their sight than if they witness your down- fall into a four-wheeler. Kings have driven in hansoms, and Cabinet Ministers have been tipped out of them; but who ever heard of a King or a Cabinet Minister driving in a "growler" ?

Of course, a 'bus is low, but you need not say you came in one, only you must be care- ful! The other day old Lady Toppingham called and grew quite eloquent on the level- ling influences of 'buses; they might do for cooks and tradespeople, she said, but her principles were such that she really couldn't 139

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ride in one. All the time she was clutching a blue punched 'bus ticket on the top of her card-case with her relentless thumb. I agreed with her, and said that I also never could nor would, and no sooner had she gone than I was off to Whiteley's on top of a blue Kensington. Still, it is levelling, and you should always pick off the straws and never cling to the tickets.

However, the most ignoble conveyance is undoubtedly the ** growler." To go in one to a smart afternoon reception requires courage. I shall never forget my last experi- ence. It was an awful function, and both sides of the street were lined with private carriages, and a double row of footmen graced the porte cochere.

My four-wheeler was the only one in sight, and it was the forlornest of its kind. It shook like jelly and rattled like artillery. A burly being in sackcloth and dirt (instead of ashes) rolled off the box, and sixteen perfectly equipped footmen had their features set to a preparatory grin. I placed my foot on the dirtiest cab step in London, and from my white-gloved hand I dropped a liberal fare into a grimy paw. To the 140

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joy of the attendant footmen the owner of the paw said the most appaUing things. I stopped the hurricane with another shiUing, and flew up the steps and took refuge in extra haughtiness, and overdid it!

I was thankful when I was ushered into the drawing-room and cooled off in the icy stare of the other guests — some thirty women and two men.

Nothing betrayed that I was a "growler" lady as I took the limp hand of my hostess, who favoured me with a speechless smile. This she temporarily detached from a su- perior man in superior garments, such as, to do them justice. Englishmen only know how to wear. He was very perfect, and in one of his blank eyes he wore a glass.

I don't know his name, but I shall never forget him. He was evidently one of the lilies of the field who only know of four- wheelers by hearsay. Whether our hostess stopped smiling long enough to murmur an introduction I do not know, but we were quite lost among the furniture, and as much thrown on each other's society as if we were on a desert island. So when he uttered inquiringly something that sounded like 141

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"yum," I said desperately, knowing it could strike no answering chord, "I came in a four-wheeler; it requires a good deal of moral courage."

Then I stopped, blushing and embar- rassed. How would he express his scorn! I stepped aside to give him a chance to vanish out of my plebeian neighbourhood; but, instead, said this gallant Englishman, bringing his eyeglass to bear on me, "Ow — ow — really ? So did I. Never drive in anything else." Yes, there are heroes even in London drawing-rooms.

Has any one ever heard of a footman with wife and children ? Can that cast- iron countenance ever unbend ? Does that vacant look hide mighty thoughts, or does it hide nothing ? Is a footman himself ever scorned ? I do hope he is, for he has made me suffer so much. I have sometimes thought that if I owned a footman I should be too proud to live; yet on studying the faces of my fellow men so blessed, I find that they are not proud, but quite modest, and sometimes even shabby.

Yes, the owners of footmen are mostly less prosperous in appearance than their 142

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servants, while the possessor of a butler and footmen galore looks quite poor. But I do wonder where footmen go when they are old ? I never saw an old footman but once, and that was in a registry office, a dim sanctuary, dotted by desks and orna- mented by agitated ladies.

The awful temporary power of registry office clerks, how they do make one quail! There was about the old footman a fictitious smartness, a youthfulness so out of keeping with his haggard face that it gave me a shock. For once I was sorry that the biter was bit, and that the stony-hearted clerk behind his desk imparted his wisdom with such brevity and disdain.

I shall never forget the insinuating wist- fulness with which the old man leaned across the desk, and, gracefully using his well-brushed silk hat as shield, described how bad times were, and that he would be glad to take any place at all, at any wages; all he wanted was a home. He would even go into the country — even in the country! It was too pitiful, and my heart ached for him as I recognised in the shabby smartness of his well-fitting clothes

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one who had "valeted'* in higher spheres. By the way he held his top hat I saw how perfectly he had studied the outside of manners.

The cruelty of the beefy clerk was colos- sal. "We can't place old footmen, nobody wants 'em." He spoke like a machine. '* But I'll take your name." The old man tripped out with a pathetic lightness as if to prove to us all by a sample how active his legs still were. So it seems that even the proudest footman should not be too proud.

I am not so afraid of butlers as I am of footmen. I have never met with an affable footman, but I have known one or two butlers who were quite fatherly. With one, in particular, I always long to shake hands. I admire his clothes so much. Never for an instant would any one take them for a gentleman's evening clothes. The magnifi- cent girth of his ample tail coat shadows the most respectable of black trousers; they pretend to no higher sphere, but are per- fect for the state of society in which they move. A rather fine head, like a respect- able Roman Emperor's (if such a person- 144

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age ever existed), completes an impressive personality.

I don't know what he thinks about me, but when he vouchsafes me something that is a smile and yet isn't a smile, I feel grati- fied. I always thought that his ancestors fought for my friends' ancestors in the battle of Agincourt, but, on inquiry, find he has been with them six months. The temporary owner of this great man is quite modest.

One of the funniest exhibitions of tem- porary power I once observed in America — in a church. Two of us had gone to hear a great American preacher, and we had been invited to sit in the pew of a friend, in a church to which we were strangers. We came early, and waited patiently just within the church door to be shown to the seat. Only a few stragglers had arrived, and all were waiting humbly for that important functionary — the sexton.

Now the American sexton — the verger — is a very mighty man indeed. Parsons come and go, but the sexton stays for ever. If he is not very tall and dignified in black broad- cloth, he is generally fat and fussy in the same. He picks out waiting sinners and 145

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seats them according to his boundless ca- price. He knows just the kind of stray sinner who may be ushered into a charitable pew, and he knows the pews that decline to receive stray sinners under any consideration.

It is curious what courage it takes to penetrate into a stiange pew; it is being a kind of Sabbath burglar. Never does a right-minded sexton usher an out-at-elbow sinner into the pew of the rich and great. That they are presumably addressing the same Divine Power is no reason. This explains the Roman Catholic hold on the people. If you are a Roman Catholic, you enter God's house and pray anywhere; but if you are a Protestant, what shy pauper would dare to stray into an expensive pew for a communion with his God ?

My American sexton had, in the mean- time, bustled down the centre aisle. He looked the little crowd over haughtily, and he refused to catch my wistful eye — my companion was getting very tired. At last I ventured, "Would you kindly show us to

Judge 's pew.?" "Can't now, I'm busy;

my young men will come presently," and he darted off.

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His young men did not come, and I looked vainly about for succour, for the pews were filling up. Suddenly the great swing-door at the entrance opened, and in came a tall commanding figure, a man of advanced years, whose name is a household word in the land, the great preacher him- self. He pulled off his battered slouch hat, and I saw his kind, keen eyes as they rested on the white hair and tired face of my friend. "Why are you waiting here, what can I do for you ?" he asked.

"We are waiting to be shown to Judge 's pew," I explained.

"I will show you, come with me." This he did, and left us the richer by the kindliest smile in the world.

Different countries, different exercise of temporary power. The English railway guard is not impressive nor much in evi- dence. The American railroad conductor, on the other hand, is a great man, but he exercises his power genially, and in the inter- vals of collecting tickets he is approachable. He generally takes up his abiding place at the end of one of the "cars," and puts his legs on the seat opposite and talks with a

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much flattered chosen one. He sees a good deal of the world, not being shut into a cubby-hole like his English brother. In the course of years of travel along a particular route his popularity becomes so great that it culminates in gifts, and many a popular conductor blazes in the light of a huge diamond *' bosom pin," or carries under his arm at night a gorgeous presentation lan- tern. No man is so great but he feels flat- tered at his notice, and he really is not very proud, considering, and his power is benign. In England his namesake, the 'bus con- ductor, has often made me feel the blight of his authority. There was once a mis- anthrope who took to keeping a light-house; if I were a misanthrope I would become a 'bus conductor. It must, of course, be awfully irritating, that temporary support he gives to beautiful ladies as they topple off^; but it is compensated for, to some ex- tent, by wrenching the arms of the lovely creatures as he hauls them on the foot-board of the 'bus before it stops. This, they say, he does out of pure benevolence, so that the poor 'bus horses shall not have to start up the cumbersome machine unnecessarily. Still, 148

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one ventures to ask if we poor women are not of as much consequence as a 'bus horse ?

Last year a benevolent conductor nearly dislocated my arm as he pulled me up, and I ached for two months after. I protest against this misplaced tenderness! It is said that an Englishman may ill-treat his wife with more impunity than his dog, but I don't believe it. I am not afraid of the conductor unless I get in or out of his 'bus; but the haul he gives me in, which sends me reehng against the other passengers, and the pull he gives me out when I recline for a moment, without any gratitude, against his outstretched arm, makes him unpopular with me.

There is an American product which, with the American invasion, has, alas and alas! taken root here, and that is the American hotel clerk, real and imitated. He has come with the great caravanserais, and, like the American plumber, he is the target for American wit.

There is no doubt that it takes a cool and composed personality to "wrastle" with the traveUing public, and yet the travelling 149

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public is not half so terrible as the cool and composed hotel clerk. He has brought insolence to the level of a fine art, and as he is answerable only to a corporation, that means that he is answerable to no one. He always puts you into a room you don't want, and having no pecuniary interest in the matter, it is to him of no earthly con- sequence whether you stay or not.

Complain to him, and you complain to deaf ears. He apparently has nothing to do but to loll behind the office counter and improve his finger-nails. Tumultuous rings of various bells leave him unmoved; pas- sionate telephonic appeals he only answers when he chooses. He turns to an agonised public a face like carved wax and eyes like agate, and it recoils. The parting of his hair is a monument to his industry.

When I call on a guest at a big hotel I deliver up my card with hope, because, as the poet rashly sang, "Hope springs eternal in the human breast." Then I sit down and wait as near the office as possible, and wistfully watch the elegant leisure of the great man behind the counter. My card has disappeared in the custody of a small

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boy with a salver, and the chances are that before I see him again he will be a man grown.

After having waited half an hour I ven- ture to intrude on the peace behind the counter, and I am received with a hauteur which puts me in my right place at once. The guest, being merely a number, excites no earthly interest, but the clerk wearily sends another infant in search of the first, and then turns his immaculate back on me, and I am permitted to admire the shiny smoothness of his back hair. I again subside, and in my indignation I make up my mind to complain to the daily Press: Is thy servant a door- mat that he should be so downtrodden ?

Do not preach about the ancient tyrannies of kings and emperors, and other estimable folks, about whom history has probably told a good many lies, and to these add the further lie that I am happy because I am free and independent. I am not free and independent! Instead, I languish under the tyranny of a hundred thousand tyrants, before whom I grovel and quake. Several of them sleep on my top floor and treat me with much severity.

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Instead of thousands of tyrants, give me, rather, one tyrant; I can accommodate ex- istence to him, and it is distinctly more interesting and less complicated.

The problem of existence is its multitude of tyrants. Indeed, how delightful life would be if we were not so tyrannised over by the down-trodden!

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The Extravagant Economy of Women

THE trouble with women is that they do not know how to spend money. The great majority never have any money, or they are at the mercy of some grim mascuHne creature, be he father or husband, who demands items — now think of an average man bothering himself about items! It must be a sur- vival of the time when we inhabited harems, or when we were beautiful dames to whom our true knights gave undying love but nothing more substantial; or we rejoiced the souls of the ancient patriarchs though we did not succeed in extracting any cash.

I don't for a moment beUeve that the lovely Hebrew damsel, Rebecca, had a penny of her own, nor that the peerless Guinevere had half-a~crown (or whatever the coinage was) to buy her Launcelot a love token. And though Scheherazade — that peerless, self-contained, circulating 153

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library of a thousand and one volumes — told enough stories to her Sultan to have made the fortune of a modern publisher, she could hardly have made less even if she had had the felicity to write a modern novel. The favourite of the harem would, it is certain, have found a purse a hollow mockery.

Now we modern women are the descend- ants, more or less remote, of Rebecca, Guinevere, and Scheherazade, and our greatest resemblance to our fair ancestresses is that most of us have no money to spend, and those of us who have do not know how to spend it. Heredity is an excuse for being what might be called the stingy sex.

What would the world have been Hke had the purse-strings of time been held by women ? More comfortable, possibly, but, probably, much less beautiful. It takes the great, splendid masculine spendthrifts in high places to glorify the world with treasures of priceless art. But it was an immortal maiden queen who inspired the greatest poet of all time, and as the production of poetry has always been cheap, so poetry was the splendid and inexpensive contribution to 154

Extravagant Economy of Women

the glory of her reign made by a not too extravagant queen. It is the men who keep aUve the extravagance, the beauty, and the ideahty of Hfe. But Httle credit to them who have always been able to put their hands in their trousers pockets and jingle the pennies.

Now time may mean money for men, but who ever heard that time meant money for women ? No one, for the simple reason that it does not. Time and trouble are of so little value to the average woman that she squanders the one and is prodigal of the other in the most appalling way. And by the average woman, are meant all such who do not earn their own living, no matter how modestly; nor those who have some serious purpose in life, though without the object of earning; nor those who, as wives and mothers, may estimate their time as of the value of a general servant's. But apart from these the rank and file of women, consist of the aimless ones — and there are all sorts of aimless ones: rich and poor, high and low, — who potter vaguely through life, through shops, through streets, through joy, through sorrow; think feebly, talk feebly,

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and feel feebly, and finally fade away, and cease to exist. Now think of the majority of men frittering away life Uke that!

For ten years I lived opposite an able- bodied, middle-aged woman who sat in a rocking-chair by the window, crocheting from luncheon time until dark, four mortal hours, and this for ten long years! Then she moved or died, I don't remember which. And yet, after all, how many of us sit with our hands folded, doing nothing, thinking nothing, but just mentally and physically limp, weighed down by empty, useless time, which we try to kill with yawning despera- tion.

We are adepts of the idle industries because our time is of no earthly conse- quence. Think of the miles of lace we crochet, the impossible embroideries we make, the countless odds and ends we con- struct, of no earthly use except to catch dust. Think of the hours we waste at the piano which no one wants to hear and which we never learn to play; think of the awful pictures we make, which no one wants to see; the innumerable things we do that are so much better done by some one 156

Extravagant Economy of Women

else. There may be male loafers, super- abundant male loafers, but it seems to me as if their united numbers are as nothing com- pared to those worthy lady loafers who are perfectly respectable and perfectly idle. Why should a woman be permitted to loaf unreproved ? Is idleness a feminine privi- lege ?

The average man is trained to do some one thing as well as his intelligence and his industry will permit, but the average woman is trained to do nothing, at least nothing well — she cannot even keep house well. Her only object is to fill her aimless exist- ence with something, anything, just to kill time.

In other days girls were carefully taught all domestic employments; they had to learn to keep house, to sew delicately, to cook, and, indeed, to do all those innumerable minor things which are of such vast importance. The modern girl is only taught not to be illiterate, that is all. With this negative quality as a dowry, a pretty face and nice clothes, and some empty chatter, she is be- stowed on a perfectly innocent young man in search of a helpmate.

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Perhaps for the first time she has a httle money — I speak, of course, of the respect- able middle-class woman, for the lowest and highest are of no account, meeting, as they often do, on the dead level of extravagance. Now what can we expect of a young middle- class wife who has some money for the first time ? That she wastes it when it should be saved, and saves it when it should be spent. She buys cheap food, but she deco- rates her baby with that white phish cloak and that awful plush cap which her middle- class soul loves, and which bear witness to her prosperity. So her olive branch is carried about in plush while her husband has dismal retrospects of other days, hardly appreciated, when he took his luscious supper at a third-rate restaurant, which in remembrance seems a banquet fit for the gods.

To spend money in just proportion to one's income, however small, and not to spend too little — for there is such a thing! — requires a higher degree of intelligence than the aimless and the inexperienced pos- sess, and the woman who earns money has a keener, juster knowledge of its value than 158

Extravagant Economy of Women

the woman who gets it from the mascuHne head of the family under whose thumb she languishes. Also, as I have said before, she has to learn the value of time in the process of evolution from the harem to the ballot-box.

I have a dear friend, a woman with a massive intellect, who is, however, not above economy. She has been in search of an ideal greengrocer, and, after much tribula- tion of spirit and waste of precious hours that mean literally pounds to her, she found him in Shepherd's Bush. Lured by the bucolic name, tempted by a vision of sprouts at "tuppence" per pound instead of "tup- pence ha'penny," she made a pilgrimage there, wasted a whole precious morning, and joined a phalanx of other mistaken female economists who stood on wet flags in Indian file, each waiting her turn to be served. My intelligent friend waited twenty-five minutes, until she was finally rescued by a serving young man, and had the rapture of saving sevenpence.

She, naturally, returned home in triumph and in a 'bus, but she was so used up by her economy that it would have been flattery 159

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to call her a wreck. That night she had a chill, the doctor was summoned in hot haste, and he proceeded to attend her with that assiduity which only adds another terror to illness. When to this is added the bills for a protracted visit to the seaside, my intelli- gent friend confessed that it hardly paid to save sevenpence.

Now is it not also the extravagance of pure economy that takes women to the "sales," where they buy all the things they do not want ? Would there be sales-days if there were only men in the world ? Did you ever see a man go from one shop to an- other to get a necktie "tuppence" cheaper? To be penny wise is indeed the supreme attribute of women! For the economical one it is a terrible ordeal to go shopping with a father or a brother; a lover is differ- ent, he is still full of temporary patience. But husbands and fathers have no patience.

"If you like it, take it, but don't waste people's time," says the irate man, as if there weren't innumerable steps to be taken after the initial process of liking.

"I think I can get it a little nicer at Smith's," you urge, while your dear one 1 60

Extravagant Economy of Women

looks at you cynically, for nicer means cheaper, and he knows it. *' Come on then," and he bundles you into a cab, drives to Smith's, and lets the cab wait while you try to make up your mind. Those dread- ful cabs, how they do make the economical woman suffer. Did you ever hear a woman declare that it is really cheaper in the end to take a cab ? When does a woman ever think of the end ? The average woman avoids a cab on principle. She feels it due to this same principle to draggle her skirts through the mud, to get her feet wet, and to come home an "object." But thank good- ness, she has saved a cab fare, and you can get twelve quinine pills for tuppence.

Is it not also a part of our extravagant economy that makes women eat such queer things when they are by their lonely selves ? What self-respecting man would lunch off a sultana cake, a tart, or an ice ? Show me the self-respecting woman who has not done it! Women know how to cook — some of them — but none of them know how to eat. A woman feels that to eat well and substantially is a sheer waste; there is nothing to show for it, but she would i6i

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not hesitate a moment to spend even more in something that she can show. A man doesn't think twice about having a ''rip- ping " good dinner and a bottle of extra good wine; he thinks it is money well spent, but he will be hanged before he would buy himself an ornamental waistcoat and sus- tain life on a penny bun.

What awful things we should eat if it were not for men! I am sure table d'hote dinners were invented by some philan- thropist to save women. *'I cannot eat a la cartel' said a friend of mine in a piteous burst of confidence: "its just like eating money." So when her husband travels with her he always leads \i^xXo\httahle d' hbte if only to preserve her from starvation. When she is resigned to the cost, she has an excellent appetite. I really think if it were not for men women would wrap themselves in sable and point lace and starve to death.

Is it not the woman who is the apostle of appearances ? Go to a dinner party where the wines and the food are rather poor and well served, and you may be sure it is the fault of the dear female economist at the head of the table.

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Who of us has not come across a gorgeous establishment where it takes three footmen and a butler to serve a tough chop of New Zealand lamb. The presiding goddess after- wards drives out in the park in an equipage magnificent with coachman and footman, and horses shining like satin with care and good feeding. No, they are not fed on New Zealand lamb!

For some people it is a wildly extrava- gant economy to ride in a 'bus. I know of a family of girls who pine for a 'bus ride as we poor things do for a chariot and four. They can't afford it; it would ruin the family credit, which is only kept up by a magnificent carriage — unpaid for — and a superb coachman and footman whose wages are owing. If one of these girls were to be seen in a 'bus, it would mean their downfall in the eyes of the confiding trades- men. No, not everybody can afford to ride in a 'bus. After all it is only the rich and great the world permits to be shabby.

I heard of a nice girl who ''slums" and

who lives in the East End, having shaken

the dust of Mayfair from her feet. She has

reduced self-sacrifice to a science, and her

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life is an orgie of self-denial, and she is a hollow-eyed, haggard young martyr, and keeps body and soul together on five shillings a week. My only criticism of this scheme of altruism is that every once in a while she neglects and starves herself into an awful fit of illness, and has to be taken back to Mayfair and brought to life, and then the good physician sends a thumping big bill to her parents, who never get any credit for charity. Now I think even a modern martyr ought to have just a grain of com- mon sense.

There is a certain intellectual town in America where tramcars still issue return tickets at reduced rates. How well I re- member two dear maiden ladies, armed with principles, walking up and down in the snow and sleet of a winter's night one whole hour waiting for the particular tram which would accept their tickets. They let unnumbered other trams jingle merrily past, while they paddled about in the slush, strong in their sense of economy. They each saved three cents, and one nearly died of pneumonia.

One wonders how many of us die because of our reckless economy .? Are we not for 164

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ever doing things for which we have neither the strength nor the capacity, just to save a few pennies, and do not many of us repent all our life long ? I well remember a lady who to save hiring a man, lifted her piano to slip a rug under. When I saw her, she had, in consequence, been a helpless in- valid for years with an incurable spine complaint.

Are not cheap servants another favourite female economy ? I have seen a sensible woman rejoice because she had captured a cheap servant as if, what with aggravation of spirits and broken crockery, a cheap ser- vant does not take it out of one in nervous prostration. Not to mention that the in- competent eat just as much as the com- petent!

Did I not read this very day how two delightful female economists, waiting for the opening of a certain theatre, sat on camp-stools from nine in the morning till seven in the evening of a cold, damp winter day for a chance to dive into the pit, and so to save a shilling or two. Was there ever a more cheering example of feminine wis- dom and thrift ?

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I knew a woman who had the economical fad to get double service out of a match, but she found it awfully expensive. She went upstairs one night to dress for dinner. A doorway, hung with a frail, floppy art- curtain, connected her bedroom and her dressing-room. As she entered, she heard shrieks of "fire" in the street, and tearing open the window she found the house opposite in flames, and in an instant fire- engines came clattering through the crowd. She was a kind soul, but she did enjoy herself immensely, watching it comfortably from her window. It was over in no time, and as she looked at the chaos of fire-engines and firemen the thought struck her how convenient it would be if there were another fire just then in the