To begin, then: Be mistress of yourself. Amid all your temptations to angry or sarcastic speech (and how many and how strong these are, you and I know), curb yourself with the recollection that it is despicable, no less than useless, to say cutting things to one who has no right to retort upon you in kind.
“Ma’,” says Miss Aurelia in Miss Sedgwick’s admirable story, “Live and let Live”—“how can you let your help be so saucy to you?”
Master Julius, who was standing by, took a different view of the matter.
“If Ma’ doesn’t want her help to be sarcy to her,” he said, “she hadn’t ought to be sarcy to them.”
Teach your children the like forms of kindly speech and habits of consideration for the comfort and happiness of your domestics, checking with equal promptness undue freedom and the arrogance of station. It is as graceful to bend as it is mean to grovel.
Learn not to see everything, and, so soon as you can, put far from you the delusive hope that anybody else—unless it be dear old John—will ever serve you as well as you would serve yourself. This failure is attributable to some one of the nine-tenths we spoke of just now. She is a prudent housekeeper who can wink at trifling blemishes without effort or parade. There is one text which has come into my troubled mind hundreds of times on such occasions, calming perturbation into solemnity, and bringing, I hope, charity with humility—
“If Thou, Lord, shouldst mark iniquities, O Lord, who shall stand?”
But if your hold of the rein be gentle, let it also be firm. Never forget that the house is yours, and that you—not hirelings—are responsible for the disposition of the stores purchased with John’s money.
“I was much amused the other day,” said an easy-tempered lady to me, “at a talk that passed under my window between my new cook and one of her visitors.
“‘And how are ye gitting along?’ asked the guest.