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I must distinctly own that the genuine shrew endeavours to make life more or less unhappy for both sexes.  Usually we are apt to think of the shrew as resembling the village scolds who used to be promptly ducked in horse-ponds in the unregenerate days; but the scold was an individual who was usually chastised for making a dead-set at her husband alone.  The real shrew is like the puff-adder or the whip-snake—­she tries to bite impartially all round; and she is often able to bite in comparative silence, but with a most deadly effect.  The vulgar shrieker is a deplorable source of mischief, but she cannot match the reticent stabber who is always ready, out of sheer wickedness, to thrust a venomed point into man, woman, or child.  I shall give my readers an extreme instance towards which they may probably find it hard to extend belief.  I am right however, and have fullest warrant for my statement.  I learn on good authority, and with plenitude of proof, that trained nurses are rather too frequently subjected to the tender mercies of the shrew.  Nothing is more grateful to a cankered woman than the chance of humiliating some one who possesses superior gifts of any description, and a well-bred lady who has taken to the profession of nursing is excellent “game.”  Thus I find that delicate young women of gentle nurture have been sent away to sleep in damp cellars at the back of great town-houses; they have had to stay their necessarily fastidious appetites with cold broken food—­and this too after a weary vigil in the sick-room.  Greatest triumph of all, the nurses have been compelled to go as strangers to the servants’ table and make friends as best they could.  It is not easy to form any clear notion of a mind capable of devising such useless indignities, because the shrew ought to know that her conduct is contrasted with that of good and considerate people.  The nurse bears with composure all that is imposed on her, but she despises the shabby woman, and she compares the behaviour of the acrid tyrant with that of the majority of warm-hearted and generous ladies who think nothing too good for their hired guests.  I quote this extreme example just to show how far the shrew is ready to go, and I wish it were not all true.

Next let me deal with the mean shrew, who has one servant or more under her control.  The records of the servants’ aid societies will show plainly that there are women against whose names a significant mark must be put, and the reason is that they turn away one girl after another with incredible rapidity, or that despairing girls leave them after finding life unendurable.  I know that there are insolent, sluttish, lazy, and incompetent servants, and I certainly wish to be fair toward the mistresses; but I also know that too many of the persons who send wild and whirling words to the newspapers belong without doubt to the class of mean shrews.  Whenever I see one of those periodical letters which tell of the writer’s