g in church--that is, presuming we go to church. While
there is a world shortage of cooks, the earth is stuffed with lady
typists far beyond repletion. Whereas you can always buy a diamond
necklace (if you have the money), you can hardly find a tiny house, even
if you throw "love" in with the payment. Where you may find a hundred
people to do what you don't want, you will be extremely lucky if you come
across even one ready and willing to do what you really require done.
Nobody seems to like to be merely useful; they would far sooner be
ornamental--and starve. Where a man can have the choice of a thousand
girls who can't even stitch a button on a pillow-case, the feminine
expert in domestic economy will go on economising all by herself, until
the only man who takes any real interest in her is the undertaker! It is
all very strange, and very unaccountable. But I suppose it will forever
continue thuswise until the world ceases to lay its laurels at the foot
of Mary and to give Martha the "go by."

I never can quite understand why the bank clerk who marries a chemist's
"lady" assistant is not considered to marry very much beneath him,
whereas if he elopes with a cook we speak of it as a complete
mesalliance. But the cook would, after all, prove extremely useful to
him, whereas the chemist's "lady" assistant could only make use other
knowledge to poison him one evening without pain. In the same way, if a
bankrupt "Milord" takes in "holy matrimony" a barmaid with a good
business head, the world wonders what heaven was doing to make such an
appalling match. Should, however, he marry "a lady of title" who is
entitled to nothing under the will of her late father, the Duke of
Poundfoolish-pennywise, and can't earn anything herself, the marriage is
spoken of as a romance, and the Church blesses it--and so does the most
exclusive society in Balham. Utility seems never to be wanted. The
world only asks for ornaments.

It is the same in the drama, where Miss Peggy Prettylegs of the Frivolity
Follies will draw the salary of a Prime Minister for showing her surname,
while Miss Georgiana de Montmorency, the actress who knows Shakspere so
intimately that she mutters "Dear old Will" in her sleep, is resting so
long in her top flat in Bloomsbury that if she lived on the ground floor
she would inevitably take root.

It is the same in literature, where "Burnt Out Passion" runs through
sixty editions and dies gloriously in a che