"The women who talk most about the servant question, my dear," I said sententiously, "are the over-dressed, underfed matrons you see at the lobster palaces, who live on one meal a day, which they take at a restaurant, and spend their mornings in curl-papers and wrappers."
"What I can't understand," resumed Letitia reflectively, "is the total disappearance of what we read about as the dignity of labor. Surely, Archie, it has a dignity. Some people must work for the benefit of others. If everybody had to dust, and sweep, and sew, and cook for herself, what would become of all the graces of life, of literature, art, music? I don't see anything so disgraceful in housework. We can't all be equal, can we—except in theory? Why, when you see two people together for just five minutes, you can note the superiority of the one, and the inferiority of the other."
I had no desire to be dragged into an economic discussion. My mind was not in a condition serene enough to grapple with it. I had just paid out nearly eleven dollars to the ice-cream and candy purveyor who had surreptitiously cooled Madame de Lyrolle's "innards."
"I suppose," continued Letitia, "that the reason New York women look so much nicer than they are is that the poor things have no time to do anything for their own mental refinement. They must eat like paupers, live like laborers' wives, and rely for their only pleasure upon clothes and a nocturnal restaurant. Then they slink back to their joyless 'home' and go to a bed that they have, themselves, made."
"Poor souls!" I sighed.
"You can't blame them for lack of conversational power," said Letitia, "or for want of internal resources. They can't even have children in comfort. Mrs. Archer told me that when she was first married she was so busy, and so uncomfortable, and so pressed for room, and always without a cook, that she literally had no time to have children. She wanted a little boy, but put off having him until she got a good cook. And as she never obtained the good cook, she felt that she had no right to make a poor little boy unhappy."
"Mrs. Archer talks nonsense," I remarked rather severely (I felt it my duty to be severe on this occasion).
"I don't see it at all. The comforts of home are even more necessary in case of children. These wretched creatures who masquerade as servants and who detest you simply because you employ them—and for no other reason—are menaces to safety. Imagine children around with the inebriated, incompetent drudges we have had—"
Poor Letitia was talking "race suicide" with a vengeance, and I was not inclined to pursue the subject. Cook as an exterminator of the human species seemed too glittering a novelty. Yet there was much common sense in what my level-headed little wife said.
"Cook is a tragedy, my girl," I admitted. "The world has had servants for centuries, and the world has progressed. Now that the end of the old régime is at hand and the cook has turned, I can't fancy that the world will be routed. Something new will be discovered, and cook can hang herself. The world must fight its own battles. It is up to the world, and you and I are just atoms."