Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: r occasional Irish and semi-occasional Germans. She had never thought much about house servants. One had them. They did the work well and stayed, or they failed to do the work well and went. Griggsby, the butler, had attended to all that. There had been a pretty Irish chambermaid called Kitty. Jean had missed her when she disappeared, and had felt unhappy when the girl's successor had said that Kitty was in trouble. She had even sent some money, but it hadn't occurred to her to look the girl up and give her anything more than money. Then there was Barbara's Sarah. Sarah was different—a personality. Perhaps general housework servants were all personalities, but the Herricks were the only people Jean knew intimately who got along with one servant so she couldn't generalize. She intended to be a personality herself; but, looking at the women around her, the rose-coloured side of domestic service dulled a little and she felt a twinge of apprehension. Was it the life that had made the women or had the women made the life? There were a few women neatly dressed, quiet-mannered, intelligent looking; but the rest—who was responsible? Perhaps if the women who were served took a warm human interest in the women who served them, perhaps if the place where one worked were a home; but what could chapter{Section 4one do with a cook like the blear-eyed derelict in the corner, or the silly-faced, flashily dressed girl whose willow plume waved in the breeze by the window, or the stolid, dull-eyed woman on the front row of chairs, or the loud-voiced, hard-faced, coarse-mouthed girl who was telling a friend what she "up and told" her last employer? If only one could catch them young, very young. There must be some way. The system must be wrong and if one could find out what was wrong "Jea...