his cereal and allowed sugar. If the sugar be not provided, and he sees the others eating the syrup which he loves but may not have, it is almost too much to expect that he will wait patiently until his needs are remembered.
Waiting is a department of woman’s work which is capable of being greatly improved and raised to a higher standard. The women who will improve this department are those who appreciate the necessity of good health, and who will use every means in their power to secure health and to keep it. They are women who will learn thoroughly the duties they have elected to perform. They will train hand and foot to do their instant bidding. They will train the eye so that nothing in the daily routine will be left undone, and so that nothing outside of it which may add to the general comfort will escape their notice.
In the Invalid’s Room
It may be objected that the sick-room is not a place for the waitress—that the trained nurse is also the waitress of her patient. This is often true, for in cases of extreme illness it is many times unsafe to allow the confusion of voices with the noise of movement which accompanies the entrance of one unaccustomed to invalids. There are, however, numerous instances of transient illness or indisposition which are to be considered. If a little girl has had croup in the night, and must be kept in bed the next day, a nurse is not sent for; or if a boy goes swimming too early in the season, and has such a cold after it that he cannot get up, it will not be considered necessary to bring some one in from outside to take care of him. Then there are convalescents after
an illness, and elderly persons who perhaps two or three times a week may need to breakfast in bed. Enough cases to make it worth while for a waitress to consider as a part of her training the proper way to conduct herself in the sick-room.
The nearer she brings her work to perfection in other departments, the nearer perfection will she be in this.
The first thing to consider will be the nicety of her appearance and the absence of noise. If she has been out in the street to do an errand, she will on no account hasten to the sick-room with a tray before she has replaced by her soft shoes the heavier ones which may have a squeak in them. And she will at no time go hastily into a sick-room. She will open the door as softly as a nurse herself would do, and move as noiselessly when she is in the room. She will not express by her looks that she thinks a patient is worse than the day before, or say, in what she calls a whisper, as she goes out, “She looks a good
deal paler,” or, “I really believe he is going to be down sick.”
The tray taken to an invalid should be studied as carefully as the table in the dining-room. A trained eye will let no spot or stain on the dining-room linen escape it; nor will a trained waitress fail to replace a spotted cloth by a fresh one. On a tray cloth a coffee stain or a fruit stain is not at all sure to escape notice because it is covered by a plate or a saucer. That plate or that saucer is the very one that will surely be lifted, and the stain will jar the sense of neatness, which grows more keen when one is shut in from all outside things which in health claim the attention.