MANNERS AND MODES.
OWING TO THE SHORTAGE AND PROHIBITIVE PRICE OF SILK STOCKINGS, THE LADIES MAYFAIR DECIDE TO DO WITHOUT THEM AND HAVE RECOURSE TO PAINT.
Mistress (to maid who has just served boarders’ breakfast). “What were they talking about, Jane?”
Jane. “You, Mum.”
MANUAL PLAY.
One point emerges very clearly from the murky chaos of the industrial situation to-day; and that is that the brain-worker will not for ever be content to be merely a brain-worker, thinking and thinking, hour after hour, day after day. He is beginning to realise his latent capacity for manual labour; and he demands as his right a larger opportunity for self-development, so that he too may escape from the drudgery of brain-work and rise at last to the higher, freer life of muscular exertion. There must already be many brain-workers who are well-fitted to take their place in the ranks of manual labour; and the cry goes up with increasing force that, given only that opportunity which is every man’s due, millions of their fellows are capable of lifting themselves to the same standard.
In my house the cry goes up with peculiar force about Easter-time, when I repaint as much of the house as I am allowed and whitewash the rest, and can appreciate what I am missing in my everyday calling. It is astonishing to think that one used actually to pay people money to paint and whitewash, and looked on with meek wonder, for six weeks, while they did it. Bourgeois I may be, but I have put aside that folly. The Easter holidays now are to me the best holidays of the year, because for four whole days I can do almost unlimited decorating. I begin with the conservatory; I do it a delicate pale blue, and it looks very lovely. The vine in the conservatory no longer yields her increase as she used to do, but I can’t help that. After the conservatory I start on the basement, and the opportunities in the basement are endless. It is a curious thing that brain-workers who do much decorating in their spare time do most of it in the basement and not in the rooms they have to occupy themselves. The basement is fair game. Another curious thing is that the people who do have to occupy the basement never seem to appreciate what you are doing for them. They appear to think you are merely amusing yourself.