"H ... ph!" she said, "I shouldn't have thought foreigners were so particular."
The average German housewife has to keep the house going on exceedingly small means and with inefficient help. It is her pride and pleasure to make a little go a long way, and she can only achieve this by working with her hands. Probably her servant cannot cook, but she can, and it would never occur to her to let her husband and children eat ill-prepared food because servants do not like ladies in the kitchen. A German lady, like a princess of ancient Greece, considers that it becomes her to do anything she chooses in her own house, and that the most convenient household workshop is the kitchen. The Idealist from whom I have quoted before was the daughter of a well-known German diplomatist, and she had been used since childhood to the atmosphere of Courts. She was an accomplished well-born woman of the world, but she had not been a week in her sordid London lodgings with the woman she calls Mrs. Quickly, before she blundered in her innocent German way—into the lodging-house kitchen. Figure to yourself the stupefaction and the indignation of Mrs. Quickly, probably engaged, though the Idealist does not say so, in dining off the foreign woman's beef. "I went down to the kitchen," says Fräulein von Meysenbug, "with a muslin gown on my arm to ask for an iron so that I could iron my gown there. The kitchen was Mrs. Quickly's true kingdom; here she alone reigned at the hearth, for the servant was not allowed to approach the saucepans. Mrs. Quickly looked at me with unconcealed astonishment as I came in, but when I proffered my request her astonishment turned to wrath. 'What!' she shrieked, 'a lady ironing in the kitchen? That is impossible.' And with the mien of offended majesty she snatched the gown from me, and ordered the little maid servant to put an iron in the fire and to iron the gown; then she turned to me and said with tragic emphasis, 'You are a foreigner. You don't understand our English ways: we consider it extremely unladylike for a lady to enter the kitchen, and worse still if she wants to iron her own gown. No, ma'am, please to ring the bell when you require anything; otherwise you will ruin my servants.' Much ashamed of my ignorance on this higher plane of English custom," continues the Idealist, "I crept back to my parlour and laughed heartily as I looked round the dirty, wretchedly furnished room, and reflected on the abyss set by prejudice between the ground-floor and the basement."
"How do you like your new German governess?" I once asked an English friend who lived in the country and had just engaged a German lady for her only daughter.
"Oh! I like her," said my friend without enthusiasm. "She is a brilliant musician and a fine linguist and all that. But she has such odd ideas about what a girl ought to know. The other day I actually caught her teaching Patricia to dust."
"If you don't watch her," I said, "she'll probably teach Patricia to cook."
My friend looked anxious first, and then relieved.
"I don't see how she could do that," she said. "The cook would never have them in the kitchen for five minutes. But now you mention it, I believe she can cook. When things go wrong she seems to know what has been done or not done."
"That might be useful," I suggested.
"I don't see it. I expect my cook to know her work, and to do it and not to rely on me. I've other fish to fry."
But the German housewife expects to have her fingers literally in every pie even when by rights they should be employed elsewhere. You hear, for instance, of a great Court functionary whose wife is so devoted to cooking that though she has a large staff of servants she cannot be persuaded to spend the day anywhere but in her kitchen. Mistresses of this kind breed incapable servants, and you find, in fact, that German maids cannot compare with our English ones in qualities of self-reliance, method, and initiative. They mostly expect to be told from hour to hour what to do, and very often to lend a hand to the ladies of the household rather than to do the thing themselves. Indeed, though the servants are on duty from morning till night more than English servants are, in some ways they have an easier time of it than ours, because they are used so much to run errands and go to market. Everyone who has been in German towns can remember the hordes of servants with baskets and big umbrellas strolling in twos and threes along the streets in the early morning. They are never in any hurry to get home to work again, and a good many doubtless know that what they leave undone will be done by their mistress. The German kitchen with its beautiful cleanliness and brightly polished copper pans I have described, but I have not said anything yet about the fidgety housewife who carries her Tüchtigkeit to such a pitch that she ties every wooden spoon and twirler with a coloured ribbon to hang by against the wall. In England you hear of ladies who tie every bottle of scent on the toilet table with a different ribbon, and that really has more sense in it, because it must be trying to a cook's nerves to use spoons tied with delicate ribbons that must not be spoiled. Every housewife has dainty little holders for the handles of saucepans when they are hot. You see them, all different shapes and sizes, on view with the piles of kitchen cloths and the various aprons that form part of every lady's trousseau, and if you have German friends they probably present you with a few from time to time. I have never noticed any pictures in a German kitchen, but there are nearly always Sprüche both in the kitchen, and the dining-room and sometimes in the hall: rhyming maxims that are done in poker work or painted on wood and hung in conspicuous positions—