“I suppose the lodging-house keepers can’t cook themselves, and can’t get servants who can,” said Lucy. “And oh, Mr. Black, many of the old style lodging-house servants were terribly overworked and underpaid and ill-treated. I once went to get lessons from a lady who had apartments in one of these houses. She told me that there was only one servant—an undersized creature who had opened the door to me. There were four sets of apartments in that house, apart from her mistress’s family of four people, and the girl got no help, except a little in the cooking, from the mistress’s aged mother. The washing was done at home there, and the servant did it all! My teacher told me that the girl was on her feet and hard at work from six o’clock in the morning till after ten o’clock at night, and ‘the worst of it was,’ she added, ‘the girl was learning nothing, and getting so used to scamped and slovenly work, that she could never rise to anything better than the same drudgery.’ She had very low wages. A week’s illness would mean the hospital. Her life’s sole resting-place would be the workhouse. We can’t be sorry for any changes which end such a state of things, can we, Mr. Black?” “Well, no, certainly not,” he said, “but are they ending? By the look of the servants I saw in the big boarding-houses, I shouldn’t think their lives are much easier or better. They may have higher wages. Mrs. Mott’s girls certainly had a better time. They were comfortable and happy when they chose to be so. She paid them a very fair wage, considering that she taught them housework thoroughly. She says that some of the girls she had long ago went from her place to the very best situations. One of them afterwards married a young farmer, and when she visits London she always comes to see Mrs. Mott.” “As for getting meals at restaurants,” pursued poor Tom, “I can’t do it. I can’t afford it. I know they are very cheap; but somehow there doesn’t seem much ‘bite’ in their platefuls. And there’s such a noise, and such a hurry, and such a horrid smell of food. If fellows really have to come to that, I don’t wonder they take to drinking and smoking. There’s something unreasonable about the whole thing. Here are girls nowadays ready to do men’s work for half men’s wages, so that fellows can scarcely get work at all. When I was in the City the other day I saw a great crowd of men round an office. They were pushing right up the stairway and half across the road. I thought there must have been a murder. I said to a commissionaire who was standing by, ‘What’s up?’ ‘Oh,’ says he, ‘these people are applying for a clerk’s place that’s advertised.’ ‘Anything specially good?’ I asked. ‘No, sir, only a pound a week,’ he answered. And I know it’s always so. Yet our ways of living are all getting dearer, and no woman is ready to be well paid for doing what we can’t do for ourselves. It’s inconsistent! It’s abominable!”