Had this woman been coarse or ordinary in appearance I might have felt sorry for her lack of breeding. She was quite the reverse. She was small, with a piquantly pretty face and a pretty plump figure. She knew how to dress—wore beautiful clothes at the right times and painted her cheeks and lips only in the evening. Her hands, though not beautiful in shape, were exquisitely kept; all of her numerous rings were handsome. She seldom wore more than two besides her wedding-ring, and they were always appropriate.
The cause of her ill-breeding was her selfishness. She was determined to get all that was coming to her and could not tolerate any person from whom she could gain nothing. She was a typical daughter of a horse-leech—however much she had she must still cry “Give.”
At the end of my first week practically all the waitresses urged me to ask the head waiter to give me another station. A waitress, they assured me, was never expected to serve longer than one week at a table where tips were not given. As kindly as this advice was intended it did not happen to suit my case—not exactly. Never again, in human probability, I reasoned, would so good an opportunity to study this type of American come my way.
The millionaire paid two visits to his family while I was serving them. During each visit he took five meals. A Sunday dinner when he and his wife ate alone is memorable. After ordering practically everything on the menu, and just as I imagined them ready to leave the table, he turned on me and demanded white potatoes. He said that he had ordered mashed potatoes and that I had failed to bring them. His attack was so unexpected that I was dumb. Not so Anna.
Crossing to the table she pulled a platter from among the pile of soiled dishes surrounding his plate and held it out to him.
“There’s your white potatoes,” she told him. “You done eat ’em.”
Several days before Easter this family departed. I had served them three hundred and seventy-nine elaborate meals, been found fault with, rudely ordered about, grumbled at, and might have been reprimanded by the head waiter had he not, having learned that no tips were to be expected, studiously kept away from their table. My tip was a soiled one-dollar bill ungraciously given. It was one hundred cents more than any of their former waitresses had received, and they had been stopping in the hotel for more than four months.
The family occupied five of the most expensive rooms in the hotel and monopolized the services of two chambermaids and a scrubwoman. There was not a week while I was serving them that the wife did not make at least one trip to one of the neighboring cities. On her return she invariably boasted to any waitress who would listen of the amount of money she had spent and the expensive clothes she had bought. At one dinner she wore a wonderful evening gown, for which she stated she had paid twenty-five hundred dollars.
Knowing the wages paid to working women in New York at that time, I wondered what per cent of that sum had reached the women who had made the gown. What was their weekly wage?
It was not, however, the conduct of this family of millionaires that convinced me before I had been a week at the Sea Foam that domestic service is very different from what I had imagined. In the first place I had always assumed that hotel waiters had the same food as the guests, certainly what was left over. Such, I was assured by the head waiter and the steward, is the custom only in “cheap joints.” At the Sea Foam, if a waitress ate so much as a mouthful of food left by a guest she was discharged in disgrace.