What happened? Within five minutes after I entered the agency, before I had paid my fee or handed in my letters, two women were bidding for my services. Both were expensively gowned, both lived in a quasi-fashionable suburb of New York, and both wished me to come to her at once as second maid, the difference between the two being that one had children and the other dogs.
I elected the one with children. Instead of her waiting and investigating my references she insisted on my accompanying her back home, giving me three hours to meet her at the railroad-station. When I saw her house I understood her hurry. Chaos! Dirty chaos at that. The cook, Irish, of course, told me that five maids had come and gone during the two previous weeks.
The house had fifteen rooms, two baths, a large cellar, two wide porches, and two wider piazzas. There was a lot of shrubbery on the place and several long brick walks. In the family there was a young-lady daughter, the mother, the only son, two younger daughters, the father, and a little girl of six. I name them in the order of their relative importance.
The little girl, the mother once explained in the presence of the child, was a mistake. On the birth of her son, having decided that four children were enough, she determined to have no more—hence the difference of ten years between her son and little Mistake.
Had these people been content to live in a house of eight rooms, and do their own work with the assistance of a woman to do the laundry and the heavier cooking, they would have, in all human probability, been a happy family. They were good-natured, good-looking, and with sufficient traces of good breeding to have made them attractive.
During the seven days that I remained with them I never got to my room, which was in the garret and shared by the cook, before nine o’clock at night. How I did work! I did everything from firing the furnace to running ribbons in the underwear of the marriageable daughter.
For upward of two years it had been the chief ambition of the family to marry off this eldest girl. When I came on the scene it had become, so they all thought, a vital necessity. And I, succumbing to the atmosphere around me, did my best to help along the match. The mother explained to me that if they could only announce the engagement of this daughter the maiden aunt, for whom she was named, would see to it that she had a proper wedding and also pay the family debts.
The idea that these three grown girls, the youngest being past eighteen, might work and earn their own living never seemed to enter their mother’s head. The fact that they did not work, did not know how to do anything more useful than to play tennis and golf, she proclaimed from the housetops. Sad to relate, it was the literal truth. So far as I could learn, neither of them had ever done so much as make a bed, dust a room, or mend a garment. I never knew them to pick up a magazine, a book, or a sofa-pillow, though they knew how to scatter them broadcast. No, indeed, it was beneath their dignity to do anything to keep their home comfortable or clean, yet they boasted of skill at tennis and their golf score.
What a silly un-American idea it is that knocking a ball across country is more ennobling than doing anything that tends to make a home comfortable and happy! Will anybody deny that it takes more sense to cook or serve a good dinner than it does to play a good game of golf? Now I am not decrying the game of golf. Indeed, it appeals to me as a very good way to get elderly and delicate persons, who take no interest in nature, to exercise in the fresh air.
For a person who cares for wild or growing things golf is impossible. I cannot imagine Theodore Roosevelt wishing to become expert at golf. I can imagine the number of balls he would have lost while watching a bird, investigating a gopher hole, or studying a plant.