“The cost of the things in market, and maybe a little extra to Mr. Metzerott for the fire,” said Sally. “I used to be quick at figures, Mis’ Rolf; and if I ain’t forgot how, I’ll cipher it out, and let you know. You needn’t be afraid we’ll cheat you, or make anything out of you; we’ve been made too much out of ourselves.”
But when it was also arranged that they should do Frau Anna’s washing, Sally concluded that they might give up their work at Grind and Crushem’s.
“And how it feels to be free again, you won’t never know, Mr. Metzerott,” she said, when the deed had been done.
“Now I want to know,” said Karl, looking up from his work with a quizzical smile, “what’s the difference between the way you’re living now and domestic service. Wouldn’t it have been better to live out with some rich person, who would have paid good wages, than to work for Grind and Crushem?”
“Maybe it would,” said Sally thoughtfully. “Hired girls do get good wages, that’s so.”
“It’s your American independence,” said Metzerott. “You don’t find German girls willing to starve rather than live out.”
“There wasn’t much independence at our shop,” answered Sally dryly. “I don’t know why it is, Mr. Metzerott, but American girls won’t live out ef they can do anything else; or ef they do, they feel kinder degraded, and it makes ‘em so uppish and contrary there’s no livin’ in the house with ‘em. I’ve seen ‘em real sassy, just because they felt lowered in their own eyes.”
“They were fools!” said Metzerott briefly. “What is there in honest work to degrade any one?”
“’Tain’t the work,” said Sally; “they’d do that at home, and not feel a mite degraded; and ’tain’t the wages, for ’twouldn’t degrade ‘em to earn that behind a counter. Nor ’tain’t sass, though there’s many a lady as talks to her help like I wouldn’t to a dog. Only way I can explain it, Mr. Metzerott, it must be the Constitution of the United States. You see that makes every man as good as anybody else; but it ain’t lived up to, and the girls feel it, and that’s what riles ‘em. Worse than that, they feel they ain’t as good as the young ladies they wait on, not so pretty, nor so educated, nor so refined; but they might have been if they’d had the same advantages; they might have had just such little white hands and soft voices and pretty ways, that keep the young men a-bendin’ over their chairs all the evenin’. Don’t you s’pose many a girl sees the difference between her farmer beau and the young city doctor or lawyer that comes to the country for his holiday?” (Poor Sally! perhaps she spoke from some past bitter experience of her own!) “And so I think it’s that, Mr. Metzerott, that keeps girls from hirin’ out. They won’t take a menial position where they feel, if they had their rights, they’d be equals,—real equals, I mean, not constitutional or sassy ones. Now, your German girls ain’t taught about equality; they are used to counts and barons and dukes, and all of them people, from their cradles; they ain’t got freedom in the blood, like us Americans.”
“But we breathe it in,” said Metzerott, with gleaming eyes; “and then the remembrance of past wrongs, and the sight of present ones, makes us desperate. We shall teach you Americans, some day, to live up to your own principles.”