I also think you will find candles for the dining-table cost too much for every day, but can be an additional touch when you have guests. I wouldn’t advise you to try to follow every fashion on a small income. It will take away spontaneousness and give a strained feeling about what you do. No matter how rich you may become in the future, there will always be some one who has still more, and is able to live more luxuriously, so cultivate independence of spirit if you want contentment. People who are always straining to have what they cannot afford, in order to keep up with those about them, can never be satisfied, and have nothing in the end but disappointed hopes.

Now, Penelope, dear, I haven’t stopped to take breath since I started this letter, and I am tired, so no more until the next snag you may encounter. With the firm conviction that all your friends will try to vie with you in your good housekeeping,

Very affectionately yours,

Jane Prince.

CHAPTER VII ⬩ DUTIES OF
SERVANTS ❧ ❧ ❧

York Harbor, September 30.

My dear Penelope:

Since my last letter to you Eloise has begged me to write out the duties of three servants,—chambermaid, waitress and cook,—for a very inexperienced friend of hers, Hope Conroy, who is well off and expects to begin housekeeping soon; so you see what trouble my letters to you have brought on me! It occurred to me that you might like to have these notes for future reference when Tom has reached that pinnacle of success which we all predict for him, so I am enclosing a copy of them in this letter. You don’t need them now, but why not tie all my letters on this subject together and make a book to keep, for easy reference, in a convenient place,—that top bureau drawer, for instance?

You remember meeting Hope Conroy, I am sure, when you were visiting us last year, and have probably heard that she is to be married next month. It has made Eloise, who is practical, and who simply adores her, quite unhappy that Hope seems to think it so amusing that she knows nothing about housekeeping. With all Eloise’s brothers she has had a chance to understand men pretty well, and she thinks, with me, that there would be fewer divorces if young girls only knew how much a man cares for his comfort. So, in view of this, I felt I must yield to Eloise’s request despite the amount of writing it entailed at a time when I was quite busy with other things. I think I have just barely alluded, in some of my letters to you, to my method of recording the servants’ duties, but I know I haven’t explained it at all so I will now give you just what I wrote to Hope without any further comment: