board; the nurse whisks about the
unconscious last-born, and tosses it up and down during the ceremony.
I do not sneer at that--at the act at which all these people are
assembled--it is at the rest of the day I marvel; at the rest of the
day, and what it brings. At the very instant when the voice has ceased
speaking and the gilded book is shut, the world begins again, and for
the next twenty-three hours and fifty-seven minutes all that household
is given up to it. The servile squad rises up and marches away to
its basement, whence, should it happen to be a gala-day, those tall
gentlemen at present attired in Oxford mixture will issue forth with
flour plastered on their heads, yellow coats, pink breeches, sky-blue
waistcoats, silver lace, buckles in their shoes, black silk bags on
their backs, and I don't know what insane emblems of servility and
absurd bedizenments of folly. Their very manner of speaking to what we
call their masters and mistresses will be a like monstrous masquerade.
You know no more of that race which inhabits the basement floor, than
of the men and brethren of Timbuctoo, to whom some among us send
missionaries. If you met some of your servants in the streets (I
respectfully suppose for a moment that the reader is a person of high
fashion and a great establishment), you would not know their faces.
You might sleep under the same roof for half a century and know nothing
about them. If they were ill, you would not visit them, though you
would send them an apothecary and of course order that they lacked for
nothing. You are not unkind, you are not worse than your neighbours.
Nay, perhaps, if you did go into the kitchen, or to take the tea in
the servants'-hall, you would do little good, and only bore the folks
assembled there. But so it is. With those fellow-Christians who have
been just saying Amen to your prayers, you have scarcely the community
of Charity. They come, you don't know whence; they think and talk,
you don't know what; they die, and you don't care, or vice versa. They
answer the bell for prayers as they answer the bell for coals:
for exactly three minutes in the day you all kneel together on one
carpet--and, the desires and petitions of the servants and masters over,
the rite called family worship is ended.

Exeunt servants, save those two who warm the newspaper, administer the
muffins, and serve out the tea. Sir Brian reads his letters, and chumps
his dry toast. Ethel whispers to her mothe