It has been so long since your last letter that I feared you were ill and was at my desk starting to write you when yours came and explained the whole situation. What a picture of misery, and to think that that nice-looking Mary turned out so unsatisfactory and that you have had such a succession since her departure! So you feel degraded and as though there was something the matter with you personally, do you? Well, there is nothing the matter with you, and you are the same dear girl that you have always been, and with your willingness to give the servant question all the thought that it needs, these very experiences will help you to cope with it more wisely. It made me laugh to hear how disgusted your husband was because your present housemaid was such a fright! Don’t let that worry you; just provide her with neat white aprons and a cap and he won’t know her. Tell him I wish he had seen the little apparition that came to me, when we were first married (we were living in the South at the time), in answer to my advertisement for a housemaid. At least forty-eight tiny little braids, each about four inches long, stood straight out from her little black head and she was clad in bright red plaid from top to toe, her face beaming all over with good nature. She looked clean, as you say your new maid does, and the transformation was complete when later, with hair smoothed out, and in a neat calico dress and white apron, she stood before me for inspection. Since then, you can imagine I have had all sorts and kinds and so many experiences that I have gradually grown to look at domestic service in a broader way. You have had enough discomfort already to make you feel that it is a serious problem and I am so glad that what you have gone through has only determined you to come out victorious in the end and not to follow the example of so many women who go into apartments to get rid of household cares. Undoubtedly they do reduce the number of their servants and their worries in this way, but the family also loses much of the home feeling. What would we think of our husbands if, when the men in their employ gave them trouble, they said to us that they could not manage their employees and would have to get rid of most of them which would necessitate their reducing their business and our living in less comfort in consequence? Wouldn’t we in our hearts think they were failures in their vocations? And yet we women are just as much failures in our vocation when we give up the privacy and comforts of home to go into an apartment because we cannot manage our servants.