its vermin and would not eat them.

"H ... ph!" she said, "I shouldn't have thought foreigners were so
particular."

The average German housewife has to keep the house going on
exceedingly small means and with inefficient help. It is her pride and
pleasure to make a little go a long way, and she can only achieve
this by working with her hands. Probably her servant cannot cook, but
she can, and it would never occur to her to let her husband and
children eat ill-prepared food because servants do not like ladies in
the kitchen. A German lady, like a princess of ancient Greece,
considers that it becomes her to do anything she chooses in her own
house, and that the most convenient household workshop is the kitchen.
The Idealist from whom I have quoted before was the daughter of a
well-known German diplomatist, and she had been used since childhood
to the atmosphere of Courts. She was an accomplished well-born woman
of the world, but she had not been a week in her sordid London
lodgings with the woman she calls Mrs. Quickly, before she blundered
in her innocent German way--into the lodging-house kitchen. Figure to
yourself the stupefaction and the indignation of Mrs. Quickly,
probably engaged, though the Idealist does not say so, in dining off
the foreign woman's beef. "I went down to the kitchen," says Fraeulein
von Meysenbug, "with a muslin gown on my arm to ask for an iron so
that I could iron my gown there. The kitchen was Mrs. Quickly's true
kingdom; here she alone reigned at the hearth, for the servant was not
allowed to approach the saucepans. Mrs. Quickly looked at me with
unconcealed astonishment as I came in, but when I proffered my request
her astonishment turned to wrath. 'What!' she shrieked, 'a lady
ironing in the kitchen? That is impossible.' And with the mien of
offended majesty she snatched the gown from me, and ordered the little
maid servant to put an iron in the fire and to iron the gown; then she
turned to me and said with tragic emphasis, 'You are a foreigner. You
don't understand our English ways: we consider it extremely
unladylike for a lady to enter the kitchen, and worse still if she
wants to iron her own gown. No, ma'am, please to ring the bell when
you require anything; otherwise you will ruin my servants.' Much
ashamed of my ignorance on this higher plane of English custom,"
continues the Idealist, "I crept back to my parlour and laughed
heartily as I looked round the dirty, wretchedly furnishe