In a recent book on Russian life it is told how a young woman who had applied for the position of lady's-maid hesitated to produce her papers of identification when asked by the lady who wished to engage her. "Ah! Madame," the girl sobbed, "when you see who I am you will not take me as your servant, and I have been so long looking for a home and work by which I may live."
The lady, expecting some dreadful revelation, was astonished, when the "papers" were reluctantly handed to her, to find that the applicant for a situation as a domestic servant was of noble birth—a princess, in fact.
Princesses do not go into service in England. But ladies of title, concealing their identity, sometimes try to find a home and employment by becoming servants.
There came to me some years ago a middle-aged lady of refined and gentle appearance. She had heard that I wanted a cook, and she pleaded to be allowed to take the situation.
I told her frankly that I did not think she was a cook in the domestic sense of the word, and I asked her where she had been employed. Eventually the poor lady confided in me.
The story she told was a simple one and a very old one. The solicitor who, after her husband's death, had the management of her affairs had absconded, and she and her daughter found themselves penniless. The daughter, having a good voice and appearance, obtained an engagement in the chorus of a travelling opera company. The mother, dropping her title and changing her name, went to a registry office and entered herself on the books as a cook. In her youth she had had a taste for cooking, and had been one of the first to take lessons when it became the fashion for ladies to master the details of the culinary art.
Lady ———— had some trouble about references, but, confiding in an old friend who knew of her qualifications, she got over the difficulty. In her first situation she was uncomfortable, and after three months she left. But, fortified with a reference, she obtained a situation in a good family. There it more than once happened that Lady ———— cooked for people who had been guests at her own table in her husband's lifetime. They would have been considerably astonished had they known that their former hostess was acting in the capacity of paid cook in the kitchen of the house in which they were dining. A break-down in health compelled Lady ———— to give up her situation. It was after her recovery—the little she had been able to save by hard work swallowed up in the expenses of her illness—that she came to me, hoping I might put her in the way of getting some articles she had written on "Cooking for Ladies" accepted by a newspaper. When I last heard of Lady ———— she was going out to cook on what I believe is called "the job."
Here is a little tobacconist's shop in the suburbs. The customers who enter it daily for their cigars and tobacco, sometimes for a box of lights, and see a neatly dressed lady, who is the proprietress, behind the counter, have not the slightest idea that the lady who supplies them with their packets of cigarettes and ounces of tobacco has a "handle to her name," that her husband is the heir to an earldom, and that in due course the fair tobacconist who is keeping a little shop for a livelihood will have a right to, sit among the peeresses of England as the Countess of —————.