again. And my curiosity was so great to see when she would really look after a servant's comfort that I made no further effort toward exacting it from her.

Yet, snooping myself one day, I found the room hung with pennants on which were lettered the names of Canadian towns Gladys might have passed through en auto, or might (mighter, in fact) have bought in a Toronto ten-cent store. There were bits of cretonne cushioning, ricture-postcards of lovers, artificial flowers, and cracked mugs, and shell from Catalina Island. It made me sigh to step from that room, in which she took so much pride, into the filthy kitchen, which also belonged to her. The kitchen had pretty blue-check curtains at the window. It had a high mantel-shelf, with old copper jars on it which would have shone with beauty if polished. The long dresser of dishes was attractive, and the whole would have presented a pleasant room to learn to be a good wife in if it had been looked upon as anything but a prisoncell.

One of our guests at one of Beechey's luncheons commented with aptness upon this discrimination of Gladys between beauty that had to do with her and that which pertained to hated service. Beechey burst into luncheons as soon as my trunks were unpacked and the sparse linen purchased. She sweetly wished to share her friends with me, and she had every reason to be proud of them. It is one of the charming traits of the English that, no matter how poor you are, if they like you, they will come any distance, climb any number of stairs to see you, and they will invite you to their houses, no matter how shabby you are, to meet their very bestdressed acquaintances. If they smiled at Beechey, they smiled indulgently, and never seemed to show the social exhaustion I felt at the close of a luncheon which was to have been served at one and came staggering up on a tray at two.

Naturally, I would be the more exhausted, as it was my maisonnette, and I had to struggle with the added responsibility of making conversation with strangers, while Beechey directed below-stairs, and trying to remember

the hyphenated names. It was of no assistance to me that I knew their husbands' names. I would have to know their father's name as well, or their mother's name, or some family name that they sought to keep green by placing it just before the last, or one of the last, of their husbands' names. And to this day I don't know whether I should address them by the last name or the whole combination, or, as they playfully seem to, drop the last altogether, and concentrate on the first in the arrangement. We Americans have one advantage, two in truth: we can do anything wrong and not be thought any more dreadful than usual, and we can always begin a conversation with "Say." As I grow older, I stick more and more firmly to being an American, and I frequently "say-ed" these pleasant women.

I remember it was one of them-she knew everything and everybody, and was writing a book about those things she knew which could decently be put down in a book-who, with an author's eye, watched Gladys as she recklessly served the delayed luncheon. When it would seem that she had permanently withdrawn, the guest dared to comment upon the appearance of our general, or, rather, to respond to my own coup d'œil and my whispered, "Did you see her apron ?"

"Yes, and I saw her hair," the guest replied.

Gladys, although provided with aprons by me, had on as filthy a one as I have ever met. But her hair was coiffed, and the black velvet ribbon was lower than ever on her forehead. Cap? Well, rather not. Canada?

"What intrigues me," continued the hyphenated lady who bore her first and third husband's name, "is her vast interest in her hair and her indifference to the apron. She is wearing it. It is part of her."

"It is n't part of her," spoke up another woman. "That's just it. It's part of Mrs. Closser-Hale"-they hyphenate me over here, do it firmly; protest is useless-"and she does n't take any interest in it at all."

"But she would look smarter, I dare say she would be prettier, if her apron was nicer," continued another one of

these amazing people. Not that I discouraged their frankness. I was grateful for this impersonal view, their criticism in no way including me. I felt no responsibility for our servant. As the woman said of her husband, "Thank God! we are no blood relation."

"It's a badge of servitude, an apron. They have that in their heads, and if they can discredit it, they will do so. My maids won't step to the corner with their caps on any more."

We still talk of servants in America, but long ago they stopped this in England, and now they have begun again. So, after all, it was not because it was low to talk of servants, but for the reason that it was not really part of the issue of living. But it is very much part of the present issue, and I find that the great ladies over here enjoy it as much as the Dorcas Society does in an Idaho village. I sat forward, for I wished to get into the talk again, if only as a member of the Dorcas Society.

"Why won't they wear their caps?" I asked.

"I wanted to know that, too. Bowen -that's my parlor-maid-said she would lose her chances."

"Chances for what?"

"Chances to get married, of course. Possibly to the ironmonger's son near by, or some one who is in trade."

My brain whirled.

"Then this scarcity of servants can be traced back to mere sex," I shouted.

"Mere sex!" exclaimed the lady with the names of two husbands and who was writing a book about them.

They all looked at me, and there fell one of those embarrassing British pauses which I have learned is embarrassing only to the American. We fly into words to fill it, saying nothing, while they are just leisurely thinking things over. My words flew about wildly, but they were not as senseless as they appeared on the surface:

"I did n't come over for this!" Then they all laughed, because when in doubt it is safe to show appreciation of what Americans say. The chances are we are trying to have our little joke.

After they had left, falsely pretending I was going to take a walk that I might look at the tablets and the tombs

of Chelsea, which always delights Beechey, I flew up to the registry. The blonde was not at all glad to see me, as she had my money and no more servants; but since those conditions endured, I thought the least she could do was to talk to me.

"Oh, they will go back into service," she said crossly, she was always cross with me after I had paid my fee, but, then, she had many Gladyses to contend with throughout the day, and I had only one,-"but they won't as long as they can draw the out-of-work donation."

"Out-of-work donation?" I echoed respectfully.

"Yes, madam," banging desk-drawers full of names of cooks who would n't cook, "the government donation. Domestic servants went into munitions, motor-driving, into the Land Army, into all sorts of high-paying positions during the war. And with the money they bought gramophones and fur coats and lessons in jazzing, and when the war suddenly ended, the Government, out of recognition of their services, arranged to pay these workers four-and-twenty shillings a week for fourteen weeks, or until they could find work at their old pursuits. The same thing held good for the men. You should see them on Fridays, drawing their money. 'Silver queues,' they are called."

"Can't they find work?"

"Most of them can, but they won't look for it until the donation ceases." "I thought they went into war work for patriotic reasons," I said bluntly. "Did they in the States?"

"No," I admitted. "They took the job because the pay was higher."

"So they did over here. Don't let us deceive ourselves. The ladies of the upper classes worked for patriotic reasons or for excitement or to get away from their homes; but to thousands of our women it has been one huge holiday. Gramophones and fur coats!"

I could not respond to her impatience over the music-boxes and the warm wraps. There was something pathetic to me in these first purchases made by girls who lived in carpetless basement rooms, with no music for them save from the pianos of their betters above, and never entirely warm when out in

the raw air until the war and its vast emoluments made fur coats possible. Many of them have no longer these treasures in their possession. In the north of England the pawnshops bear placards in the windows that no more fur coats will be accepted, and gramophones bring only a few shillings.

The sister of Gladys, who worked in the Land Army, was drawing an out-ofemployment donation, and refusing to live at home or contribute to her mother's support so long as the twentyfour shillings weekly was paid her. Gladys herself said it was "fierce" to take money one did n't earn, but that it was awful hard to go back to a kitchen.

"But if it's a nice kitchen?"

This was false in me, for I don't think any kitchen is really very nice except to learn to be a good wife in. And this sympathizing with one side and then with the other is going to end in a very bad article, with no proper deductions drawn, and the reader left all up in the air with me and the rest of the world. Gladys forbore to comment on kitchens.

""T ain't that. You can't get in the right set if you 're working private. When you 're in a factory, you go in a good set. A non-com., even a private, won't look at a hired girl if he can get somebody working, say, in a candyfactory. I was in a chocolate-factory oncet, and was in a dandy crowd."

"Why did n't you stay in the factory?" I suddenly prodded. She evaded the question. Of course she had lost her job, incapable, as ever. So I continued: "What difference does it make whether you 're in a candy-shop or a kitchen? You 're the same girl."

Gladys was standing by the table, eating the crumbs on the cloth in lieu of brushing them up.

"You 're the same girl all right, but we ain't got no standing. Kitchen work is work in a kitchen, and a factory job is a business."

She went out, catching her apron on the door-knob, uttering a "Damn!" and dropping my minute ration of butter on the floor. But I did n't care. She had hit it. Any work on top of earth is looked upon as a business except domestic service, and until that time comes

when it will be a business, women of to-day, tortured by the wave of feminine unrest that has come sweeping over us, will avoid it. If we could make the world over, and sponge from the brain all meaning of the word service save its most beautiful significance, the intelligent girl who has a special aptitude for housework (and I still think this type predominant) will continue to strive for a place in some black factory by day to earn a blacker hole to sleep in by night. And she is unhappily right, for this poor striving is only her way at maintaining her self-respect. She will no longer be a serf.

Good comes out of evil. This alarming refusal to return to domestic service now that the necessary curtailment of the personnel of English houses, great and small, has lessened, has caused the sober-minded men and women of Great Britain to treat the domestic problem as thoughtfully as the other huge labor conditions which have ever confronted them. Scared into it, as I have said, but at any rate really endeavoring to recognize menial work as a business. But the point is that they do not call it a business. They still call it domestic service.

Some committees have made no wiser concessions than the adoption of a handle to the names of their employees; they are called Mrs. or Miss. Others, however, are arranging with them hours for work as definite as those in a factory. Hostels are being established, that they may not "live in" if they do not want to; uniforms are taking the place of caps and aprons. Maids are sent in by the hour, at tenpence-twenty cents an hour, and at Highgate a club has been opened which all of England is watching. I know the woman who started this club, and how she has planned it for years. It is amusing that she has accomplished at Highgate what I suggested at Kennebunkport, Maine, and was sneered at for my efforts.

But all women of all countries must have discovered by now that, in the new order of things in this world, they must put others at ease if they mean to be at ease themselves. For I believe this rebellion would have come among domestics even had there been no world

embroilment. The war brought to them, as well as deep grief and quickly forgotten losses, a period when they were just as good as anybody, and they are loath to return to a condition undeniably held in poor esteem by their fellowcreatures.

Just at present, as I have outlined before, we are in the worst stage of all, for the English servant will not work for those who are n't kind to her, yet despises those whose sway is gentle. I wish a woman's brain could be entirely taken apart, like a watch, thoroughly cleaned, and the good little jewels of the works set to gleaming again. I wish I were wise enough to do it. But, there, I can't clean a watch, much less a girl's brain.

So far I have terribly muddled it. My landlady is out a very good maid because of the present of four shillings from me. In my quaint desire to be loved I gave her this money, and as it was just one dollar more than she had calculated on to eke out her scanty existence, she decided to dispose of the vexatious sum as soon as the nearest

pub was open. It opened at twelve, and she fled, but to return. To return and create a mild scene by standing in front of my window and railing at me for "swanking about with my money."

It was very "tiresome" to my landlady, who had found her a good servant up to the dollar spree, and it was very embarrassing to me, as I feared the girl had lost her place. If a maid drinks in America, out she goes; but my landlady had no thought of dismissing her. The patient householder is accustomed to half-pint sprees, if not to two-quart ones, and we saw the maid no more because some other anxious housewife snatched her up, profiting, no doubt, by the enervation following the party.

"It does n't do to be too nice to them," said my landlady, which showed a great deal of restraint. "Now, about this mouse-trap-"

But I continued silently mutinous as she explained the vagaries of the mousetrap. It is the last clutch of the feudal

system, this control by fear. The servant still vaguely recognizes it, even as she resents the system; it keeps what poor wits she exercises under the ordered sway which we all need to preserve our balance. But it clamps down the best of her, for the overlord of old was intent only upon the discipline that brought immediate results to him. Planning a future for his vassals was never one of the aims of the baron.

As I say, to all intent I was confining my attention to the mouse-trap furnished by the landlady. With the coming of Gladys we had grown even more popular with rodents in our neighborhood. Word went round among the mice that two Americans and a Canadian were living up the street, and that what the Americans did n't eat abovestairs the Canadian left on the floor below-stairs as she hurried out to her evening jazz. Properly speaking, it was not a mouse-trap. But the landlady, with that curious attention to pennies and indifference to pounds which marks the aristocrat who goes into business, had it stored among her effects and thought it might be used. It was really a rat-trap, a very large one, and if a mouse once moved into it the little creature could roam very comfortably through its long galleries for the rest of its life, and make itself a decent home. If bored, Mr. Mouse need not trouble to go out the main entrance, but could exit between the wires, which were wide enough.

Yet it was brought to us to catch mice in, and we were besought, if we did catch one, not to kill the little thing, but to carry the trap and all over to Battersea Park, a distance of about a mile, and let it out. She had tried it herself with a string bag, but, curiously enough, there was no mouse upon her arrival. Yet this was the lady who would not furnish me with a scrap of carpet for my maid's room!

Now, who is to solve the servant ques tion over here when no one has begun to solve the mysteries of the mistress who engages the servant?

You remember that last day after luncheon at your delightful club, as we sat on the terrace looking down into the gardens that stretch to the Avenue Gabriel?

You speculated on what impressions America would make on an American who had been away through the most exciting period of her history-an American who saw the armies in action, who saw Germany and Hungary in revolution, who was bored and disillusioned by the bickerings and intrigues of the peace conference, who saw Europe everywhere on the brink of economic smash-up, and who through it all had looked back to America as a comparative heaven of sanity, health, and safety. You wondered whether the war had affected America essentially or only superficially. You wondered what America was thinking about, where America was going. You said that was the most important question in the world.

Well, I'm going to give you a picture of America as I find it. Perhaps,

after I've seen a little more of my country, I'll be able to tell you where it is going.

I do not think I could begin any better than with probably the most amazing city in America-Detroit.

One day last summer I heard an American officer in Paris say to a prominent French woman: "You 'd enjoy America. We are n't so crude, you know. We have several cities with distinctive atmosphere; San Francisco, for example, and New Orleans, and that charming old French town, Detroit." Maybe the American's reference to Detroit was facetious. Maybe, on the other hand, he had never been in Detroit. Charming old French town! When I saw Detroit first, in 1899, it was a sleepy middle-Western city, rather like overgrown village; possibly a whiff of its eighteenth century French atmosphere did cling somewhere about it. But to-day! There is atmosphere, yes; but its single characteristic is a smell of gasolene. Imagine this. cluster of new sky-scrapers thrusting gawkily up out of a welter of nonde-. script old buildings. A big open square crowded with automobiles; great radi

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