employer and employee, “mistress” and “servant,” are those of mutual aid.  Such relations may be, and too often are, those of an inefficient little drudge for a “mistress” almost equally ignorant and inefficient.  But when the employer is an intelligent woman with a sense of justice (I prefer a sense of justice to sentimental theories about sisterhood—­people do not always treat their sisters justly) the weekly money payment and food will be but a small part of the girl’s wage.  In addition she will receive a training that will equip her for the “higher” branches of domestic service, or for homemaking on her own account.  Not every girl has the sense to appreciate this when she gets it, nor the intelligence to profit by it; while it is certainly rather trying to the employer when the girl is “all agog” to “better herself” as soon as she has gained a bare smattering of how to do certain things properly.  But all this is “the fortune of war.”  Some girls never cease to be grateful to their first teachers and leave them reluctantly, while other girls never realise that they have anything to be grateful for.  When gratitude and affection come they are pleasant to receive.  But the motive power of the really conscientious woman is not the expectation of gratitude or affection.

A word to the unconventional homemaker.  The young “general” is a bird of passage.  Age and experience bring with them the necessity of earning more, and if her first employer cannot periodically raise the girl’s wages the latter must in time seek better paid employment, probably with a mistress who is not unconventional.  It is unkind, therefore, to refrain from teaching the girl how she will be expected to do things in the ordinary conventional house.  I do not mean that the employer ought to slavishly run her home on conventional lines for the instruction of her “help.”  But it is kinder, for instance, to help a girl regard a cap and apron with good-humoured indifference, or as on a par with a nurse’s uniform, rather than as “a badge of servitude.”  It is kinder, too, to show her that it is not only “servants” who are expected to address their employers as “Sir” and “Ma’am,” but that well-mannered young people in all conditions of life can be found who use this form of address to persons older than themselves.  I do not suggest for one moment that any attempt should be made to delude a girl into the belief that she will not be expected, in conventional households, to behave with equal deference to persons younger than herself.  Such deception would be unpardonable.  But it is anything but kind to allow a young girl to drift into careless and familiar habits of speech bound to lead to dismissal for “impudence” in her next “place.”  There is a type of person, for example, who seems to believe that, in order to show that he is “as good as anybody else,” it is necessary to be rude and familiar.  But good manners are not necessarily associated with