The pantry should be treated in the same way as the kitchen as regards decoration, and should only have mats on the floor, and no fixed covering there at all. Only the china, glass and silver in use should be kept in this room, the latter, if valuable, only in the day time, and even then in a small locked safe. If the pantry should be large, the extra glass and china can be kept there in locked cupboards, accessible to none but the mistress. Here in the ordinary ship’s cabin provided by the suburban builder, the ‘fitment’ style of cupboard is most useful. As a rule the maid only wants room enough to stand or sit by her sink to wash up and clean the daily silver, and so the tiny space can be almost filled with cupboards; and here is an excellent place for the stores and jam-closet: the ordinary suburban resident if wise, getting in her stores once a week from Shoolbred, and not dealing with the local grocer, who, all too often extracts orders from the maids when none should be forthcoming. If there really is no room here for them, cupboards must be erected in the maid’s room, whether it be that vexed third room or another. Somewhere there must be a store-cupboard, properly regulated and properly looked after by the mistress herself, and no one else at all; otherwise, that way most undoubtedly lie bankruptcy and disorganisation, often enough one and the same thing. The maids’ sitting-room should be papered with some pretty, light paper, and should have either a dado of cupboards and shelves in the fitment style, or else a real dado of plain, self-coloured oilcloth, which can be wiped over with a damp duster daily. This and the paint could once more be brown, as could the dado-rail. The ceiling must be whitewashed. There should be a nice table for meals and work, six ordinary Windsor chairs, and a couple of comfortable basket chairs, with hard-wearing, tapestry-covered cushions. These should be considered the property of the elder servants, if four are kept; but, of course, if the housemaid is of ‘staid’ age, and careful she could have a nice chair too. I think the ordinary kitchen chair a cruel thing, except for use at meals, and see no reason why the maids should be condemned to its use and nothing else, when, surely their backs must ache sometimes as well as the backs of other far less employed women undoubtedly do.