Marion Harland's Complete Cook Book: A Practical and Exhaustive Manual of Cookery and Housekeeping

mistress. Like all other good things it has its perils and its abuses to be avoided. Two-thirds of the scandals that poison the social atmosphere steal out, like pestilential fogs, through servants’ gossip. We discuss “the girl” in our bedchambers, and if so much stirred up by her works and ways as to forget what is due to our ladyhood, compare notes in the parlor as to these same works and ways. Being well-bred women, the traditions of our caste prevent us from making domestic grievances the staple of drawing-room conversation and the marrow of table-talk. The electroplated vulgarian never calls attention more emphatically to the absence of the “Sterling” stamp upon her breeding, than when she chatters habitually of the virtues and the faults of her household staff. On the other hand, the most sophisticated of us would be amazed and confounded if she knew what a conspicuous part She plays in talk below stairs and on afternoons and evenings “out.” Thackeray, prince of satirists, puts it cleverly: “Some people ought to have mutes for servants in Vanity Fair—mutes who could not write. If you are guilty—tremble! That fellow behind your chair may be a Janissary with a bowstring in his plush breeches pocket. If you are not guilty, have a care of appearances, which are as ruinous as guilt.” We should be neither shocked nor confounded that these things are so. If we are mildly surprised, it argues ignorance of human nature, and of the general likeness of one human creature to another, that proves the whole world kin. When mistresses in Parisian toilettes, clinking gold spoons against Dresden as they sip Bohea in boudoir or drawing-room, raise their eyebrows or laugh musically over the latest bit of social carrion in “our set”—Jeames or Abigail, who has caught a whiff at a door ajar, or through a keyhole, is the lesser sinner in serving up the story in the kitchen cabinet. The domestics are in, yet not of, the employer’s world, living for six and a half days of the week among people with whom they have no