Of coorse there’ll be cases where women wall be thinking it a fine thing to stay at work and support themselves.  A lassie that’s earned her siller in the works won’t feel like going back to washing dishes and taking orders about the sweeping and the polishing frae a cranky mistress.  I grant you that.

Oh, aye—­I ken there’ll be fine ladies wall be pointing their fingers at me the noo and wondering does Mrs. Lauder no have trouble aboot the maids!  Weel, maybe she does, and maybe she doesn’t.  I’ll let her tell aboot a’ that in a hook of her own if you’ll but persuade her to write one.  I wish you could!  She’d have mair of interest to tell you than I can.

But I’ve thocht a little aboot all this complaining I hear about servants.  Have we not had too many servants?  Were we not, before the war, in the habit of having servants do many things for us we micht weel have done for ourselves?  The plain man—­and I still feel that it is a plain man’s world that we maun live in the noo—­needs few servants.  His wife wull do much of the work aboot the hoose herself, and enjoy doing it, as her grandmither did in the days when housework was real work.

I’ve heard women talking amang themselves, when they didn’t know a man was listening tae them, aboot their servants—­at hame, and in America.  They’re aye complaining.

“My dear!” one will say.  “Servants are impossible these days!  It’s perfectly absurd!  Here’s Maggie asking me for fifteen dollars a week!  I’ve never paid anything like that, and I won’t begin now!  The idea!”

“I know—­isn’t it ridiculous?  What do they do with their money?  They get their board and a place to sleep.  Their money is all clear profit —­and yet they’re never satisfied.  During the war, of course, we were at their mercy—­they could get work any time they wanted it in a munitions plant——.”

And so on.  These good ladies think that girls should work for whatever their mistresses are willing to pay.  And yet I canna see why a girl should be a servant because some lady needs her.  I canna see why a lassie hasna the richt to better herself if she can.  And if the ladies cannot pay the wages the servants ask, let them do their own work!  But do not let them complain of the ingratitude and the insolence of girls who only ask for wages such as they have learned they can command in other work.

But to gae back to this whole question of what women wull be doing, noo that the war’s over.  Some seem tae think that Jennie wall never be willing to marry Andy the noon, and live wi’ him in the wee hoose he can get for their hame.  She got Andy’s job, maybe.  And she’s been making more money than ever Andy did before he went awa’.  Here’s what they’re telling me wull happen.

Andy’ll come hame, all eager to see his Jenny, and full of the idea of marrying her at once.  He’ll have been thinking, whiles he was out there at the front, and in hospital—­aye, he’d do mair thinking than usual aboot it when he was in hospital—­of the wee hoose he and Jennie wad be living in, when the war was over.  He’d see himself kissing Jennie gude-bye in the morn, as he went off to work, and her waiting for him when he came hame at nicht, and waving to him as soon as she recognized him.