"How can men be such brutes as to allow women to work! What despicable creatures they are, to be sure!"
She moves about the room frowning, and as she goes out, darts at you a look full of vengeance. It is especially in the hotels of country towns that you observe the traits above mentioned.
To get an idea of the prodigious labour undertaken by an American servant-girl, one has but to see her at work doing a room, feather-broom in hand.
The coal most used in America is the anthracite kind; it has its good qualities: it throws out great heat and burns for many hours; but it makes a quantity of light ashes, which cover the furniture of a room with a thick coating of dust every day.
Whenever I chanced to see the chambermaid in the morning shaking my curtains, and making a cloud of dust, enough to prevent one from seeing across the room, it was all I could do to refrain from calling out to her, "My good girl, you are giving yourself a great deal of trouble for nothing; don't meddle with the dust, it is better where it is." Thanks to the feather-broom, my parlour was always done in a twinkling; but before I dared go into it, I was obliged to wait until the dust had returned to its place again.
A day or two after this remarkable manner of dusting had attracted my attention, I came across the following in Puck:
Sarah is doing the drawing-room. Enters the mistress of the house, evidently fearing to be choked by the cloud of dust that fills the room.
"Sarah, what are you doing?"
"I'm dusting the room."
"I see. When you've finished, please to undust it."