The pride of the Roman prevents her, as a rule, from undertaking domestic service. When she does, she makes the roughest and worst of maids. The natural instinct of every ordinary Italian servant is to throw all refuse out of the window, as she still does in the towns of the campagna, or where her kitchen window gives upon an unfrequented courtyard, and the rest of her service is in keeping with this standard, the restrictions laid upon her by the demands of civilisation being the very thinnest veneer. She will never clean a floor on her own initiative, and very seldom on yours, and is quite capable of giving you notice should you expect it. Nevertheless if you can bring yourself to compromise with your own standard and put up with some of hers, you will find her on the whole a genial creature to deal with. She is blessed with abundant leisure, and has always time to carry on protracted conversations and even flirtations out of the kitchen window. No event in the street or in the courtyard beneath escapes her attention, yet she manages to do the housework, cook the meals, wait at table, clean the boots, iron and mend the clothes, and buy the provisions. She will, moreover, think nothing of sleeping in a mere cupboard without air or light, only fit to store boxes in, or in one of the passages on a sofa-bed which is folded up in the daytime, such plans being quite usual in a Roman household. The Italian man-servant is the most domestic of beings and is on the whole the most teachable and efficient; but he also is accustomed to lay a table by placing a knife, fork, and spoon in a bunch before each person, adding a glass, and _voila tout_, and a higher ideal than this is a severe tax on memory and intelligence. "He certainly knew how to lay a cloth when he left me," an American lady said of her man-servant who had been with her nine years, "but perhaps he has forgotten"; and he certainly had, though he had only been out of her situation a year. A so-called finished servant, who had been years in a prince's establishment, thought nothing of receiving a basket of linen from the French laundress and depositing it on our dining-room table pending further instructions, and our disapproval only grieved without enlightening him. And no instruction will impress upon an Italian the impropriety of announcing English callers by a description rather than attempting to pronounce their foreign names: "The gentleman from the hotel," or "The young lady who married that old man!" But their charming manners and easy grace disarm criticism and win forgiveness for many shortcomings.