ht to complain. That's
one trouble in the way. It's the mixing up of things, and mistresses
don't think how they would feel in the same place."

Third came an Irish-American whose mother had been cook for years in one
family, but who had, after a few months of service, gone into a
jute-mill, followed gradually by five sisters.

"I hate the very words 'service' and 'servant,'" she said. "We came to
this country to better ourselves, and it's not bettering to have anybody
ordering you round."

"But you are ordered in the mill."

"That's different. A man knows what he wants, and doesn't go beyond it;
but a woman never knows what she wants, and sort of bosses you
everlastingly. If there was such a thing as fixed hours it might be
different, but I tell every girl I know, 'Whatever you do, don't go into
service. You'll always be prisoners and always looked down on.' You can
do things at home for them as belongs to you that somehow it seems
different to do for strangers. Anyway, I hate it, and there's plenty
like me."

"What I minded," said a gentle, quiet girl, who worked at a stationer's,
and who had tried household service for a year,--"what I minded was the
awful lonesomeness. I went for general housework, because I knew all
about it, and there were only three in the family. I never minded being
alone evenings in my own room, for I'm always reading or something, and
I don't go out hardly at all, but then I always know I can, and that
there is somebody to talk to if I like. But there, except to give
orders, they had nothing to do with me. It got to feel sort of crushing
at last. I cried myself sick, and at last I gave it up, though I don't
mind the work at all. I know there are good places, but the two I tried
happened to be about alike, and I sha'n't try again. There are a good
many would feel just the same."

"Oh, nobody need to tell me about poor servants," said an energetic
woman of forty, Irish-American, and for years in a shirt factory. "Don't
I know the way the hussies'll do, comin' out of a bog maybe, an' not
knowing the names even, let alone the use, of half the things in the
kitchen, and asking their twelve and fourteen dollars a month? Don't I
know it well, an' the shame it is to 'em! but I know plenty o' decent,
hard-workin' girls too, that give good satisfaction, an' this is what
they say. They say the main trouble is, the mistresses don't know, no
more than babies, what a day's work really is. A smart gi