“There now, my dear, you see that kitchen will come into our talk,” returned Mrs. Bray, shaking a playful finger at her hostess. “You can’t shut it out. It underlies all our living, and we ought to speak about what really concerns and interests us. It is called underbred to shrink from ‘talking shop,’ but after all it is the only talk worth engaging in. You verify my words, my dear, for you wanted to turn from the kitchen to pictures, that being ‘the shop’ you prefer. But the kitchen comes first, my dear. At bottom, the pictures depend on the kitchen. The greatest artists would tell you so, though they’ve left off glorifying copper pots and carrots as the good old Dutch school used to do.”
By this time Lucy had set out her little afternoon tea-tray, and had summoned Jane to bring the kettle with boiling water. Everything else she did herself, yet she was not too pre-occupied to be amused by her visitor’s expression while the handmaid was in the room. It was the expression of a person unwillingly in the presence of a noxious animal. What pained and puzzled Lucy was, that this and Mrs. Bray’s earlier diatribe seemed to have had a good effect upon Jane so far as making her move more softly and speak more respectfully. It acted as all her own justice, patience, and consideration had failed to do.
“A horrid girl,” was the lady’s comment as Jane departed.
“You see her at her very best,” remarked Lucy, with a constrained little laugh. “You seem to have had a good effect on her. I must have made some mistake in dealing with her.”
“She sees that I know her at her exact worth, or rather worthlessness,” retorted the old lady, “and worthless people respect one for that at least as much as the worthy do for one’s just appreciation. But don’t distress yourself about your ‘mistakes,’ my dear. I’m only a visitor, and you are that hateful thing, a mistress; that gives her a different point of view. Above all, I come in a carriage, which, doubtless, she thinks is my own. My dear, make up your mind to the fact that to the common people ‘the real lady, whom it is a pleasure to serve,’ is the woman with money—the woman who does nothing, but expects everybody to wait upon her and to put her first. In their eyes, nobody who works for her living is ‘a real lady.’”
“I don’t think we need attribute these things to the ‘common people,’” said Lucy quietly. “I notice the same feeling among the mass of women of my own class.”
Whatever the old lady had originally meant, she was too keen and alert to deny the truth of Lucy’s proposition. She adroitly parried it.
“My dear, the common people form the mass of every class. There are more of them in the lower classes simply because the lower classes are the larger. Sometimes, too, the others are too cowardly to put their creed into words, though they are faithful enough to it in deeds. But of course I don’t know much about the young women of our class nowadays. I thought you had changed all that, and that all of you were running after ‘careers.’”
Lucy laughed. “I don’t think that makes any difference,” she said. “A very plain distinction is generally drawn between the young woman who selects a career for her pleasure and her ‘interest in life,’ and the other who does the same thing for her livelihood.”
“And I daresay nobody emphasises that distinction more strongly than some of your most advanced women,” said Mrs. Bray, whose searching observation, despite her professed ignorance, had probably taught her all that Lucy could tell her and a good deal more too. “So that’s the present-day way of it, is it? Well, my way would be that every girl should have her own father to give her a dowry suitable to her position, and her own husband who would do all the rest. I suppose that’s Utopia. We all have Utopias, and that’s mine. What does a woman want with a career, except for a living? Her grandmother and her great-grandmother (if she had any, poor dear!) found enough career in making the most of what the gods—I mean the men—provided.”