In few human relations does this fact seem to me to be more clearly revealed than in the attitude of the polite toward their servants. There is really, if one pauses to think about it, a tremendous amount of bunkum in the alleged relations between most of one’s acquaintances and the people who attend to their various needs. I don’t say all, because the sincere exceptions at once suggest themselves, but in the case of most I am inclined to believe that the matter is largely regulated by “what other people would think,” rather than by natural promptings--by human spontaneity. How often have I heard a woman or a man scornfully exclaim, “Servant’s gossip!” or, “She’s the sort of woman who listens to her servants!” The first great crime apparently is to take the slightest interest in the point of view, the ideas, the information or the conversation of one’s servants. Conventionally they are, none of them, supposed to have intelligence, integrity or the gift of being agreeable. Of course no end of people converse with their servants incessantly and derive from the proceeding much interest and amusement, but they very rarely admit it, and when they do, it is always in a deprecating, apologetic fashion calculated to impress you with the fact that the incident was quite out of the ordinary--which, secretly, I never believe it is. “Sometimes I let Mary Ann run on. For a maid she is really rather,” etc. For some, to me inscrutable, reason, hardly anybody admits that he ever talks to a servant on a basis of intellectual equality, and furthermore, hardly anybody ever admits, without in some way qualifying the admission, that a servant is good-looking; that he, or she, as the case may be, in different clothes and removed from the yoke of servitude, might be indistinguishable from the persons he serves, and in many instances much more charming in appearance. “When Connor, the second man, is dressed up, he isn’t a bad-looking man at all. You might almost mistake him for something else,” I have had a fat, coarse-skinned, rich, middle-aged woman half humorously assure me in speaking of one of her footmen, whose mere presence in the room made her entire family appear to be even more common than they actually were. The aristocratic tendency must have been omitted from me, for I have never been able to detect on my part the slightest desire to apologize for either intelligence or beauty wherever I wonderfully discovered it. If it is there, it is there, and instantly recognizable. But in the case of servants, it, for some reason, does not seem to be quite “the thing” to admit it.