I do not know how it is, but I get more tired of my own face and the housemaid’s than of anything else on earth. Probably no criminal feels more imprisoned with his warder than a woman can feel shut up in her own house with one or two servants; and she is so much the worse off that there is no free future to look forward to. A very unusual touch of sympathy occurs in a modern play where the writer makes his heroine retire to an empty room to have a bad headache in peace. Before she has had time to crumble into a comfortable ruin on the sofa, there is a knock at the door and in comes a housemaid armed with a tin and some little fidgety bits of rag to “polish the taps in Miss Iris’s bathroom.” The public would surely be touched if they realised the fact that there is often no spot in her own house where the daughter of woman may lay a tear unobserved. Some women do not want to cry; they have nothing to fear from Sarah Ann. But to those who do, this constant espionage becomes a positive torture. There are few things that I envy men so much as their leisure for getting on with their work. They have offices, studies, studios, in which they spend weary hours in a nerve-racking pursuit of guineas, or the appropriate word, or an elusive idea, but they are generally doing one thing at a time. They are not harassed by incessant irruptions from other workers bursting with irrelevant information about their underclothing or the state of the weather, nor are they pestered with foolish conundrums about weights and measures and the kind of subjects that “Old Moore’s Almanac” deals with so willingly. It is always possible to slam one’s door and lock it, but who really feels comfortable under the stigma of peculiarity? The comment which follows unusual conduct is in itself a violation of privacy, and so far from being alone, the offender is merely isolated the better to be observed. I do not mind ordering things--it isn’t that; nor do I mind thinking about them--thinking quite hard. It is “seeing about” them that turns my blood to vitriol and my heart to dynamite. Is a general in command of forces expected to see that his subalterns put on their clothes right side out? When he orders a charge does he find his men seated facing their horses’ tails? Does the captain of a ship put out to sea only to be told when he has crossed the Bar that “the wheel has come off in the mate’s ’and,” and that there is no more grease for the engines? And yet I believe that is the kind of thing that would happen if a mistress and her servants started out to discover America. It is rarely that a servant in a small house considers herself responsible for anything. It is thought discreditable to the mistress alone if the house is dirty and the meals badly served; and yet she has seldom the skill or the leisure to give point to her criticisms by setting a working example to those under her orders.