YOU don’t get a very good class of servant down this way, my mother says, but then she is so particular. She is the kind of mistress who knows how to do everything better herself, and that kind never gets good servants; it seems to paralyze the poor girls, and make them limp and without an idea in their heads, or what they choose to call their heads, which I strongly suspect is their stomachs. You can punish or reward a servant best through its stomach, and don’t give them beer, or beer-money either! Beer makes them cross or cheeky, depending, I suppose, on the make of the beer. Mother never gives it. They buy it, I know, but I never tell. It would be as much as my place (in the kitchen) is worth, and I value my right of free entry.

Mother is terribly down on dust too. She has a book about germ culture, and sees germs in everything. It doesn’t make her any happier. But as for dusting, so far as I can see, what they call dusting is only a plan for raising the dirt and taking it to some other place. It gets into our mouths in the end. I do pity Matter that is always getting into the wrong place, chivied here and there, with no resting-place for the sole of the foot. For whenever Mother sees dust anywhere, or suspects it, she makes a cross with her finger in it, and the servants are supposed to see the cross and feel ashamed. Though I don’t believe any servant was ever ashamed in her life. ’Tisn’t in their natures. They just grin and bear with it—with the dust, and the scolding too.

“It’s ’er little way,” I heard Sarah say once, not a bit unkindly or disagreeably, though, after Mother had come down on her about something. But once I caught the very same girl shaking her fist at George’s back and calling him “an old beast!”

“Sarah,” I said, “whom are you addressing?”

“The doctor’s donkey, miss,” she said, as quick as lightning, pointing to it grazing in the doctor’s garden next door. People were always overloading that donkey, and shaking their fists at it.

I must get to the new cook. The last one gave Mother notice, and I never could find out why, because she was fond of Mother and could stand the cats.

“Oh, I like you, ma’am,” I heard her say, just as if she disliked some one else. Mother took no notice, but left the kitchen, and Cook took a currant off her elbow and pulled down her sleeves, and mumbled to Sarah, “It isn’t right, and I for one ain’t going to help countenance it. A-visiting his family now and then between jobs, just like a burglar—or some-think worse!”

What is worse than a burglar? I was passing the scullery window, and Sarah had just thrown a lot of boiling water into a basin in front of them both, so that it made a mist and she didn’t see me. I knew, though, she was saying something rude, for when Sarah told her she “shouldn’t reely,” she muttered something more about a “neglected angel!” I did think at first she meant me, or perhaps the doctor’s donkey as usual, but then the words didn’t fit either of us? I asked her straight if she did mean the donkey, just for fun, and she said the poor beast was minding his own business and I had better do the same.

She left us next month, crying worse than I ever did in my life for really serious things. Mother patted her on the back as she went out at the back door, and she kept saying, “A poor girl’s only got her character, mum, and she is bound to think of it—” and Mother said, “Yes, yes, you did quite right!” and seemed just to want her out of the house and a little peace and quiet and will of her own. The very moment Sarah’s back was turned, she set to work and turned everything into the middle of the room and left it there while she and Cook swept round into every corner. Ariadne and I rather enjoyed clearing our bed of the towel-horse before we could lie down in it, and having dinner off the corner of the kitchen-table because the dining-room one was lying on its back like a horse kicking.

Of course George wasn’t allowed home all this time. Mother wrote to him where he was staying at the Duke of Frocester’s for the shooting (George shooting! My eye!—and the keeper’s legs!) and said he had better not come home till we were straight again. I was in no hurry to be straight again. It was like Heaven. When I was a child I always built my brick houses crooked, and Ariadne called me Queen Unstraight, and that made me cry. But she liked this too. We made all the beds, and didn’t bother to tuck them in. It isn’t necessary to do so when we turn head over heels in the bed-clothes onto the floor every night three times to make us dizzy and sleepy. We washed up everything with a nice lather of three things mixed that occurred to me, Hudson’s, Monkey Soap, and Bath Eucryl. In the end there wasn’t a speck of dirt, or pattern either, left on the plates. It looked much cleaner. Why should one eat one’s meat off a fat Chinese dragon or have bees all round the edge of one’s soup plate ready to fall in? It is a dirty idea. We basted the joints turn and turn about, and our own pinafores. They couldn’t scold us for not keeping clean, any more than they can pigs when they put them in a sty. We asked no questions or bothered Mother at all, but we black-leaded the steps and bath-bricked the grates, and washed down the walls with soda-water. The wallpaper peeled off here and there, but that shows it was shabby and ready for death.

Mother said afterwards that she couldn’t see any improvement anywhere, but anyhow we enjoyed ourselves and that is everything. We spent money on it, for we bought dÉcalcomanie pictures, and did bouquets all over the mantelpieces, but Mother insisted we should peel all these off again before George came back. He couldn’t come back till we got that cook, for George is most absurdly particular about our servants. Sarah has got used to him, and there seems to be no idea of her going. She has to valet him, for he is always beautifully dressed. She has to take the greatest care of her own appearance, and get her nails manicured and her hair waved when he is at home. That is about all for her. But the cook he calls the keeper of his conscience, that is to say, his digestion. His digestion is as jumpy as he is. Sometimes it wants everything quite plain, and he will eat nothing but our rice-puddings and cold shapes of tapioca, etc.; at another time he calls it “apparition,” and says the very name of it makes him shiver. I am used to cold shapes, alas! He sometimes brings things down from town himself—caviare and “patty de foy.” Children are not supposed to like that sort of thing, but we do, and George gives them us; he is not mean in trifles. Sometimes it is pheasants and partridges, that he has shot himself on ducal acres. They are shot very badly, not tidily, with the shot all in one place as it ought to be: Mr. Aix explained this to me. They are not to be cooked till they are ready, and when they are they are a little too ready for Mother and us, so Papa and Mr. Aix have to eat it all. George belongs to the sect of the Epicureans; I heard him tell the cook so, also that he is the reincarnation of a gentleman called Villon.

For a month Mother “sat in” for cooks, and all sorts of fat and lean women came and went. Our establishment didn’t seem attractive. George bespoke a fat one, by letter, but Mother inclined to lean. These women sat on the best chairs and prodded the pattern of the carpets with their dusty umbrellas, and asked tons of questions,—far more than she asked them, it seemed to me, and this one that we have at last got was the coolest of all, but in rather a nice way. She was tall and thin, with a long nose with a dip in it just before the tip, which was particularly broad. Ariadne said afterwards that a nose like that seemed to need a bustle. She said she was a north-country woman, and that is about all she did tell us about herself, except her name, Elizabeth Cawthorne.

She sat and asked questions. When she came to the usual “And if you please, ma’am, how many is there in family?” Mother answered, “Myself and my son and my two daughters,—and my sister—she is professional—and is here for long visits—that is all.”

“Then I take it you are a widow, ma’am?”

Mother, getting very red, explained that George is very little at home, so that in one way he didn’t count, but in another way he did, for he is very particular and has to be cooked for specially. Being an author, he has got a very delicate appetite.

“A proud stomach, I understand ye. Well, I shall hope to give him satisfaction.” She said that as if she would have liked to add, “or I’ll know the reason why.”

She seemed quite to have settled in her own mind that she was going to take our place. She “blessed Mother’s bonny face” before that interview was over, and passed me over entirely.

She came in in a week, and the first time she saw George she was “doing her hall.” Ariadne and I were there as George’s hansom drove up and he got out and began a shindy with the cabman.

“Honeys, this will be your father, I’m thinking!” she said.

Perhaps she expected us to rush into his arms, but we didn’t; we knew better. We just said “Hallo!” and waited till he was disengaged with the cabman, who wanted too much, as we are beyond the radius. George didn’t give it to him, but a good talking to instead. The new cook stopped sweeping—servants always stop their work when there is something going on that doesn’t concern them, and looked quite pleased with George.

“He can explain himself, and no mistake!” she said to Sarah afterwards, and she cooked a splendid dinner that night, for, says she to Sarah, “seemed to her he was the kind of master who’d let a woman know if she didn’t suit him.”

She doesn’t “make much account of childer,” in fact I think she hates them, for when Ariadne showed her the young shoots in a pot of snowdrops she was bringing up, and said, “See, cook, they have had babies in the night!” Elizabeth, meaning to be civil, said, “Disgusting things, miss!”

Still, she isn’t really unkind to children, and admits that they have a right to exist. She will boil me my glue-pot and make me paste, and lets Ariadne heat her curling-tongs between the bars of the kitchen fire. She doesn’t “matter” cats, but she gives them their meals regular and doesn’t hold with them loafing in the kitchen, and getting tit-bits stolen or bestowed. And they know she is just, though not generous, and never forgets their supper. They were all hid, as it happened, when she came about the place, but she said she knew she had got into a cat house as soon as she found herself eating fluff with her tea, and she thinks she ought to have been told. George laughs at her and calls her “stern daughter of the north,” but he wasn’t a bit cross when she told him that Ben ought to be sent to school. He even agreed, but Ben isn’t sent. Ben is still eating his heart out, and he keeps telling Elizabeth Cawthorne so. He is much in the kitchen. She is very sensible. She just stuffs a jam tart into his mouth, and says, “Tak’ that atween whiles then, my bonny bairn, to distract ye.” Ben takes it like a lamb, and it does distract him, or at any rate it distends him; he has got fat since she came.

She orders Mother about as if she were a child. Mother does look very young, as I have said. She ought, and so ought Aunt Gerty, considering the trouble they both take to keep the cloven hoof of age off their faces. They go to bed with poultices of oatmeal on them, and Aunt Gerty once tried the raw-beef plaster. But what she does in the night she undoes in the day, with the grease paint and sticky messes that are part of her profession.

She lives with us except when she is on tour, and is only here when she is “resting” in the Era, and all that time she is dreadfully cross, because she would rather be doing than resting, for “resting” is only a polite way of saying no one has wanted to engage her, and that she is “out of a shop,” which all actresses hate.