Several days before Easter this family departed. I had served them three hundred and seventy-nine elaborate meals, been found fault with, rudely ordered about, grumbled at, and might have been reprimanded by the head waiter had he not, having learned that no tips were to be expected, studiously kept away from their table. My tip was a soiled one-dollar bill ungraciously given. It was one hundred cents more than any of their former waitresses had received, and they had been stopping in the hotel for more than four months. The family occupied five of the most expensive rooms in the hotel and monopolized the services of two chambermaids and a scrubwoman. There was not a week while I was serving them that the wife did not make at least one trip to one of the neighboring cities. On her return she invariably boasted to any waitress who would listen of the amount of money she had spent and the expensive clothes she had bought. At one dinner she wore a wonderful evening gown, for which she stated she had paid twenty-five hundred dollars. Knowing the wages paid to working women in New York at that time, I wondered what per cent of that sum had reached the women who had made the gown. What was their weekly wage? It was not, however, the conduct of this family of millionaires that convinced me before I had been a week at the Sea Foam that domestic service is very different from what I had imagined. In the first place I had always assumed that hotel waiters had the same food as the guests, certainly what was left over. Such, I was assured by the head waiter and the steward, is the custom only in “cheap joints.” At the Sea Foam, if a waitress ate so much as a mouthful of food left by a guest she was discharged in disgrace. Our food—that is, the food prepared in the kitchen of Belgrave House—was the worst I have ever tried to swallow. During my second week, the breakfast being more uneatable than usual, I complained to Mary, my roommate. Mary was scrubwoman and maid of all work in the Belgrave kitchen. I asked her why, if they were going to send us scraps of meat over from the Sea Foam, it was not properly cooked? She assured me that the only food sent from the hotel were the meals for the Belgrave housekeeper. In proof of this she took me down to the kitchen of the dormitory and showed me the box of sliced bacon from which what I had called “meat scraps” had been taken. It was the best grade. Mary explained that the cook had emptied half of the contents of a box into a huge pan and put it over the fire. To keep it from burning he stirred it around from time to time, then ladled the mass into dishes and sent it into the dining-room. That bacon is a fair sample of the food served in the waitresses’ dining-room while I worked at the Sea Foam.