To come back to questions of expenditure so intimately related to questions of comfort, it must be remembered that in an English household there are two dinners a day: one early for the servants and children, and one late for the grown-ups; and solid dinners cost money even in England, where at present there is no meat famine. When Germans dine late they don't also dine early, even where there are children; while the kitchen dinner, that meal of supreme importance here, is eaten when the family has finished theirs, and is as informal as the meal a bird makes of berries. In a German household, living on a small income, nothing is wasted,—not fuel, not food, not cleaning materials, as far as possible not time. The tüchtige Hausfrau would be made miserable by having to pay and feed a woman who put on gala clothes at midday, and did no work to soil them after that.
"Two girls," I once heard a German say to an Englishwoman who had just described her own modest household which she ran, she said, with two maids. "Two girls ... for you and your husband. But what, I ask you, does the second one do?"
"She cleans the rooms and waits at table and opens the door," said the Englishwoman.
"All that can one girl do just as well. I assure you it is so. There cannot possibly be work in your household for two girls. You have told me how quietly you live, and I know what English cooking is, if you can call it cooking."
"You see, there must be someone to open the door."
"Why could one girl not answer the door, ... unless she was washing. Then you would naturally go yourself."
"But it wouldn't be natural in England," said the Englishwoman. "It would be odd. Besides, if you only have one servant, she can't dress for lunch."
"Why should she dress for lunch?" asked the German. "My Auguste is a pearl, but she only dresses when we have Gesellschaft. Then she wears a plaid blouse and a garnet brooch that I gave her last Christmas, and she looks very well in them. But every day ... and for lunch, when half the work of the day is still to be done.... What, then, does your second girl do in the afternoons?"
"She brings tea and answers the door."
"Always the door. But your husband is not a doctor or a dentist. Why do so many people come to your door that you need a whole girl to attend to them?"