“Well, there was Libby,” the mother answered at length, “the colored girl I had when you were born.  She really was perfect, in a way.  She was a clean darky, and such a cook!  Daddy talks still of her fried chicken and blueberry pies!  And she loved company, too.  But, you see, Grandma Salisbury was with us then, and she paid a little girl to look after you, so Libby had really nothing but the kitchen and dining-room to care for.  Afterward, just before Fred came, she got lazy and ugly, and I had to let her go.  Canadian Annie was a wonderful girl, too,” pursued Mrs. Salisbury, “but we only had her two months.  Then she got a place where there were no children, and left on two days’ notice.  And when I think of the others!—­the Hungarian girl who boiled two pairs of Fred’s little brown socks and darkened the entire wash, sheets and napkins and all!  And the colored girl who drank, and the girl who gave us boiled rice for dessert whenever I forgot to tell her anything else!  And then Dad and I never will forget the woman who put pudding sauce on his mutton—­dear me, dear me!” And Mrs. Salisbury laughed out at the memory.  “Between her not knowing one thing, and not understanding a word we said, she was pretty trying all around!” she presently added.  “And, of course, the instant you have them really trained they leave; and that’s the end of that!  One left me the day Stan was born, and another—­and she was a nice girl, too—­simply departed when you three were all down with scarlet fever, and left her bed unmade, and the tea cup and saucer from her breakfast on the end of the kitchen table!  Luckily we had a wonderful nurse, and she simply took hold and saved the day.”

“Isn’t it a wonder that there isn’t a training school for house servants?” Sandy had inquired, youthful interest in her eye.

“There’s no such thing,” her mother assured her positively, “as getting one who knows her business!  And why?  Why, because all the smart girls prefer to go into factories, and slave away for three or four dollars a week, instead of coming into good homes!  Do Pearsall and Thompson ever have any difficulty in getting girls for the glove factory?  Never!  There’s a line of them waiting, a block long, every time they advertise.  But you may make up your mind to it, dear, if you get a good cook, she’s wasteful or she’s lazy, or she’s irritable, or dirty, or she won’t wait on table, or she slips out at night, and laughs under street lamps with some man or other!  She’s always on your mind, and she’s always an irritation.”

“It just shows what a hopelessly stupid class you have to deal with, Mother,” the younger Sandy had said.  But at eighteen, she was not so sure.

Alexandra frankly hated housework, and she did not know how to cook.  She did not think it strange that it was hard to find a clever and well-trained young woman who would gladly spend all her time in housework and cooking for something less than three hundred dollars a year.  Her eyes were beginning to be opened to the immense moral and social questions that lie behind the simple preference of American girls to work for men rather than for women.  Household work was women’s sphere, Sandy reasoned, and they had made it a sphere insufferable to other women.  Something was wrong.