Lucy walked home, feeling that she and the post she had to offer were at a terrible discount. As she watched the half-starved, slipshod, ill-clad girls who were carrying packages in and out of various small “home” manufacturing premises in the district through which her journey lay, she wondered bitterly what had gone wrong with domestic service, that its wholesome food, snug shelter, and respectability were rejected in favour of this tramping, trailing drudgery. She knew enough of social conditions to know that few of those girls earned wages higher than her servant’s salary, while these had to provide everything out of their earnings, and her maid had to buy only her clothes, and had plenty of leisure to make and mend them. This proved that no mere increase of wages will bring back the tide of female labour to the haven of domestic service. It has already voluntarily ebbed away to decreased emoluments. This actually comforted Lucy a little. For though she was already paying all the wage her means could honestly afford, yet she had begun to reflect bitterly that, between the two registry offices, she had already laid out six shillings in less than two months, not to mention “deterioration of household stock” in burnt napery and other kitchen damages, still less to consider the wear and tear of her own nerves and the loss of her own time. If she was to go on paying and losing at this rate, she had realised that it would come to the same thing as offering twenty or twenty-two pounds a year. But as she saw those squalid workgirls, it was borne in upon her that the form of labour she wanted had become scarce at any price, and that at any wage she might find the same heart-breaking disappointment. Lucy gazed curiously at the crowds of young women who lounged or hurried past her. By the signboards on the forlorn houses behind the decaying gardens, she could guess the callings of the crowd. There were tailoresses, hat-sewers, cardboard-box makers, artificial florists. Looking at them, Lucy could not wish that any of them should change her mind and seek the vacant place in the kitchen. From their appearance most of them had been living poorly on sedentary work for years, and whatever they might have been at the beginning, they were sallow and haggard now. No signs of self-respect were visible on their raiment, though there was a pitiful display of draggled plumes, and sham jewellery worn over garments which seemed to have been bought third-hand, and boots such as one often sees thrown away on road-sides. Such strength as they had was clearly the strange perverted strength that resists bad atmospheres and monotonous misery, but few indeed had any sign of the wholesome vigour that is needed for honest household work. “They must have their freedom, I suppose,” said Lucy to herself, dreamily repeating an axiom which she had often heard thrown down in scorn and contempt by irate matrons caught in the strait where she was now fixed.