Under this isolation, not only must one set of utensils serve divers purposes, and, as a consequence, tend to a lessened volume and lower quality of work, but, inasmuch as the appliances are not made to perform the fullest work, there is an amount of capital invested disproportionate to the product when measured by the achievement in other branches of industry.  More important than this is the result of the isolation upon the worker herself.  There is nothing more devastating to the inventive faculty, nor fatal to a flow of mind and spirit, than the constant feeling of loneliness and the absence of that fellowship which makes our public opinion.  If an angry foreman reprimands a girl for breaking a machine, twenty other girls hear him, and the culprit knows perfectly well their opinion as to the justice or injustice of her situation.  In either case she bears it better for knowing that, and not thinking it over in solitude.  If a household employee breaks a utensil or a piece of porcelain and is reprimanded by her employer, too often the invisible jury is the family of the latter, who naturally uphold her censorious position and intensify the feeling of loneliness in the employee.

The household employee, in addition to her industrial isolation, is also isolated socially.  It is well to remember that the household employees for the better quarters of the city and suburbs are largely drawn from the poorer quarters, which are nothing if not gregarious.  The girl is born and reared in a tenement house full of children.  She goes to school with them, and there she learns to march, to read, and write in companionship with forty others.  When she is old enough to go to parties, those she attends are usually held in a public hall and are crowded with dancers.  If she works in a factory, she walks home with many other girls, in much the same spirit as she formerly walked to school with them.  She mingles with the young men she knows, in frank, economic, and social equality.  Until she marries she remains at home with no special break or change in her family and social life.  If she is employed in a household, this is not true.  Suddenly all the conditions of her life are altered.  This change may be wholesome for her, but it is not easy, and thought of the savings-bank does not cheer one much, when one is twenty.  She is isolated from the people with whom she has been reared, with whom she has gone to school, and among whom she expects to live when she marries.  She is naturally lonely and constrained away from them, and the “new maid” often seems “queer” to her employer’s family.  She does not care to mingle socially with the people in whose house she is employed, as the girl from the country often does, but she surfers horribly from loneliness.

This wholesome, instinctive dread of social isolation is so strong that, as every city intelligence-office can testify, the filling of situations is easier, or more difficult, in proportion as the place offers more or less companionship.  Thus, the easy situation to fill is always the city house, with five or six employees, shading off into the more difficult suburban home, with two, and the utterly impossible lonely country house.