“Certainly not. Who mentioned suffragettes? I’m talking of the old-fashioned women who stay at home, and look after their own affairs, and I’m sorry for them, and wonder they are not fifty times more stupid than they are, and I’m sorry I spoke. I said in my haste, ‘They can talk of nothing but their servants.’ Poor darlings! What wonder? Shut in from morning till night with two aproned fiends, who at any moment may reduce you to starvation, or poison you as you eat. (I don’t care if my pronouns are mixed! I shall mix them if I like!) Suppose man had to live day and night mewed up with his clerk and office boy; suppose you were followed wherever you went by grumbles and breakages, and a smell of onions, and daren’t let go, in case you were left to clean the sink yourself! A woman said to me the other day, that after a lifelong struggle she could not for the life of her decide which was worse—a servant who thinks, or a servant who don’t. Her housemaid could think. She thought the laundry bill had been rather high the last few weeks, so she kept back a lot of table-linen what time a party of guests were expected. She was hurt about it when reproved, and said she could never do right. She couldn’t... Martin! make up my mind for me.—Should I give Parsons notice or not?”
Martin elevated his eyebrows, and nodded once or twice with an air of enlightenment.
“Ah-ha! Now we come to it! I was waiting for the personal application. Parsons, eh! Let me hear the case. Yours and Parsons’s. Then I can judge.”
Grizel rested both elbows on the table, and supported her chin in the hollow of her hands.
“Parsons,” she said clearly. “Maud Emily, age twenty-six. Profession, House-parlourmaid. Religion, Anabaptist (I’m sure she’s an Anabaptist, by the cut of her Sunday hat). Honest. Steady. Clean in her work and person. Willing and obliging. Can clean plate... Forgets everything. Breaks the rest. Snores while waiting. Has feelings, and an invalid mamma, who, I feel it in my bones, will be tuk worse regularly on the afternoons of dinner parties. In every emergency, can be backed to do the worst possible thing... There! it’s a problem for a society paper! ... What should Mrs Beverley do?”
“Mrs Beverley should exercise patience and self-control. She should speak gently to the poor girl, who no doubt is doing her best. First Prize awarded for this solution, a copy of Mrs Tupper’s famous work, The Blue Boy Darling.”
Grizel contemplated him frowningly.
“Something will have to be done about your jokes! You have no sense of fitness. It drives me daft when a person jokes when I am worried. I’ll laugh myself in a fortnight’s time; with grace I’ll laugh to-morrow, but I won’t laugh to-day for all the jokes on earth, and I hate anyone who tries to make me do it. I’m not in the mood for jokes, and you ought to know it without being told.”
“Sorry, Madam, but there seems something wrong with your theory. You want to be cheered when you are already cheered, and not to be cheered when you are in need of cheering.”
“Silly jokes,” Grizel said firmly, “do not cheer. They can be endured in periods of health. In periods of affliction they are the last straw which breaks the woman’s back.”