drawn from
the poorer quarters, which are nothing if not gregarious. The girl is
born and reared in a tenement house full of children. She goes to school
with them, and there she learns to march, to read, and write in
companionship with forty others. When she is old enough to go to
parties, those she attends are usually held in a public hall and are
crowded with dancers. If she works in a factory, she walks home with
many other girls, in much the same spirit as she formerly walked to
school with them. She mingles with the young men she knows, in frank,
economic, and social equality. Until she marries she remains at home
with no special break or change in her family and social life. If she is
employed in a household, this is not true. Suddenly all the conditions
of her life are altered. This change may be wholesome for her, but it
is not easy, and thought of the savings-bank does not cheer one much,
when one is twenty. She is isolated from the people with whom she has
been reared, with whom she has gone to school, and among whom she
expects to live when she marries. She is naturally lonely and
constrained away from them, and the "new maid" often seems "queer" to
her employer's family. She does not care to mingle socially with the
people in whose house she is employed, as the girl from the country
often does, but she surfers horribly from loneliness.

This wholesome, instinctive dread of social isolation is so strong that,
as every city intelligence-office can testify, the filling of situations
is easier, or more difficult, in proportion as the place offers more or
less companionship. Thus, the easy situation to fill is always the city
house, with five or six employees, shading off into the more difficult
suburban home, with two, and the utterly impossible lonely country
house.

There are suburban employers of household labor who make heroic efforts
to supply domestic and social life to their employees; who take the
domestic employee to drive, arrange to have her invited out
occasionally; who supply her with books and papers and companionship.
Nothing could be more praiseworthy in motive, but it is seldom
successful in actual operation, resulting as it does in a simulacrum of
companionship. The employee may have a genuine friendship for her
employer, and a pleasure in her companionship, or she may not have, and
the unnaturalness of the situation comes from the insistence that she
has, merely because of the propinquity.